Vulgar Boatman

by William G. Tapply

  “Why not?” said Steve. “I thought that case—”

  “Baby M,” I said. “New Jersey case. One case. A precedent, sure. But every case is different. No one knows how Massachusetts courts will go. Depends on the situation, the judge, the lawyers.” I spread my hands. “I’ll make the best contract for you that I can. But different case, different state, it could go to the biological mother.”

  “Hey,” said Eleanor. “Don’t sweat it. The last thing I want is a baby.”

  “Why have you agreed to this?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Do my sister a favor. Have the experience.” She grinned ironically. “Fulfill myself as a woman.”

  “Have you folks discussed a fee?”

  “Fee?” said Steve.

  “What you’ll pay Ms. Phelps.”

  The three of them looked at each other. “I’m not doing it for the money,” said Eleanor.

  “I suggest,” I said, “that you agree to a consideration. That will enhance the viability of the contract, should it end up in court.”

  “Gimme a buck. Gimme a bag of M&M’s,” said Eleanor.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll outline what’s involved. You folks can go home and think about it, while I draw up a contract. Then if you decide to, you can sign it. Okay?”

  They all nodded.

  “You, Ms. Phelps, will agree to be artificially inseminated by Mr. Fallon’s sperm. If you become pregnant, you will agree to carry the child to term and, upon delivery, turn it over to the Fallons. You must visit an obstetrician regularly. You must eat properly, refrain from all drugs, alcohol, or smoking except as specifically permitted by the doctor. You will agree to amniocentesis, and if the fetus is defective, you will agree to an abortion if the Fallons want it. You will do all of this for a monetary consideration, which will be held in escrow pending your fulfillment of the contract. How does that sound to you?”

  Eleanor Phelps had been staring at me. When I was finished, she shook her head back and forth. “Wow,” she breathed softly. “Does it have to be so complicated?”

  I nodded. “We’re trying to anticipate the contingencies. That’s what lawyers are paid for.” I turned to Steve and Cathy Fallon. “For your part, you will pay Ms. Phelps a sum of money for this service. You will pay all of her medical expenses, plus any other expenses, such as loss of work time. You will pay her if she miscarries. I will detail all of this in the contract I create.”

  “What should we pay her?” said Steve.

  “More than a bag of candy. I’d suggest ten thousand dollars.”

  “Why that much?”

  “It’s a standard fee. If it comes to that, we want a judge to take your agreement seriously.”

  Eleanor Phelps had been staring at me. “Ms. Phelps, do you have any questions?” I said to her.

  “No. I guess not. It’s not all that romantic, is it?”

  “It’s a business proposition. It has to be.”

  Cathy Fallon reached over and took her sister’s hand. “It’s the most wonderful gift you could ever give us,” she said. Eleanor looked softly at Cathy. She nodded.

  “I don’t get it,” said Steve. “I mean, I suppose legally…”

  His voice trailed away in the unarticulated question. People who love and trust each other tend to belittle the value or power of the law to mediate their interactions. “Look,” I said gently. “This is all new stuff. One case doesn’t define the law. None of the questions has really been answered. Can a woman give up the rights to her child before conception? Can she change her mind? Does a contract such as I propose constitute baby-selling, which is illegal? Whose child is one created by artificial insemination? What are the rights of the sperm donor? Of his wife? Can those rights be altered by a contract? For that matter, what is motherhood? Or fatherhood? Do biological mothers and fathers have equal rights to the child? What are the rights of the fetus?”

  I sat back and spread my hands. Steve and Cathy Fallon looked solemn. Eleanor Phelps was smiling. “I was thinking,” she said. “All the teenage girls who get knocked up, and all the rest who are petrified of it happening. Here you have folks who just want a kid.” She shook her head.

  “I have no wisdom on that,” I said.

  We chatted for a while longer. I went over the terms of the proposed contract again for them. Cathy and Steve seemed animated, excited as they began to understand the steps. Their child was becoming a reality in their minds. They mentioned the room they would redecorate. They asked Eleanor if she would help them shop for furniture. When she shook her head and said, “No, I’m not sure I’d want to do that,” Cathy cocked her head and frowned. But then Eleanor grinned and said she was more interested in getting the kid’s stuffed animals.

  When I finally ushered them out of my office, all three of them were discussing their favorite boys’ and girls’ names.

  And I felt I was practicing the kind of law that suited me. I was helping ordinary people do positive things that they wanted to do. I was dealing with life, not death. There were no adversaries in this case, no aggrieved parties, no pain or tragedy, no anger or malice.

  Of course, there was no challenge for the attorney, either. I did not feel especially short-changed. A worthwhile challenge is getting a big brown trout to rise to an artificial dry fly. I didn’t enter the legal profession to be challenged.

  I felt so good about it, in fact, that I took Julie to lunch at Marie’s, my favorite little restaurant in Kenmore Square. And that afternoon I did the necessary research so that I could rough out a contract for the Fallons.

  I hardly thought about Buddy Baron for the rest of the day.

  Before I left the office, I called Sylvie at her Beacon Street condo, where she lives and writes children’s books. Most of her stories are adaptations of old Hungarian folk tales and myths. She writes them quickly and easily and makes lots of money at it.

  She was in a good mood when I arrived. She had just received a new contract from her publisher which would keep her busy and wealthy for six more books. She would be off to New York to visit her agent and do some bargaining over the weekend. She insisted we celebrate her good fortune. She would cook for me.

  She fed me chicken in a cream sauce with mushrooms, accompanied by broccoli and long-grain wild rice. Paprika was the dominant spice. “Old Hungarian recipe?” I said.

  “Got it out of Fanny Farmer,” she answered, grinning.

  Afterwards we had the champagne that I had brought to celebrate her contract.

  She tried to persuade me to spend the night. I put up a good fight, but she wore me down.

  The next afternoon I met Charlie McDevitt at the clubhouse at Stow Acres. When I arrived I found him arguing racehorses with Tommy Porter, one of the owners of the golf course. The debate, I gathered, concerned the relative merits of heredity versus environment in the making of a champion.

  “Blood,” said Tommy.

  “Training,” spat Charlie.

  “Up yours,” said Tommy, indisputably laying claim to the last word.

  As we strolled to the first tee, Charlie grumbled, “The hell does he know about it.”

  “He owns horses, I understand,” I said. “All you do is bet on them.”

  While Charlie was taking his practice swipes, he told me how he had finally conquered his slice. “I just aim the V’s at the tip of my right shoulder and pronate my wrists this way.” He showed me. “Presto. Today’s the day, Counselor. Today I whip your tail.”

  “Probably will,” I said. “I’ve been ignoring my V’s and neglecting my pronation lately.”

  His tee shot sailed out straight, then began to leak off to the right. It dribbled near a small evergreen that marked the edge of the fairway. “That was a controlled fade, not a slice,” said Charlie. But I thought he looked worried.

  I hooked my tee shot into the left trap. Charlie brightened considerably. “Try moving your V’s toward your left shoulder,” he said. “It’s all in the V’s.”

  “Appr
eciate the advice,” I muttered.

  As we shouldered our clubs and headed toward our balls, Charlie said, “I snuck out the other day to try out my grip. I joined up with a twosome. Guy and a lady. Turned out the guy was a priest and the gal, who had a pretty swing, she was a nun.”

  “You didn’t tell me you’d played,” I said.

  “I wanted to see how the new grip was gonna work. Anyway, this priest was a pretty good golfer, you could tell. On the first tee he hits this monstrous drive. One of those low ones that just seem to keep rising? But it gets out there and all of a sudden it takes this quick left. Wicked hook. Rolls under a tree. The priest says, ‘Aw, shit.’ Not real loud, but he’s definitely pissed off. The nun looks at him and says, ‘Now, Father, you mustn’t use such language.’ Gentle, but she rebuked him. And he says, ‘I am so sorry, Sister.’ Anyway, the priest goes over to his ball. Tough lie, but he gets a good whack at it and it takes off right for the center of the green. Then, as it starts to come down, it takes this amazing hook to the left again. Buries itself in a trap. The priest is watching in amazement, and when his ball lands in the trap he flips his club and yells, ‘Aw, shit!’ Louder this time. The nun looks real embarrassed at me, and she whispers to the priest, but I can hear her, she says, ‘Really, Father. God will surely punish you for such language.’ And the priest shakes his head and says, ‘Please accept my apology, Sister. May God strike me dead if I use profanity again.’ Look, Brady. Go ahead and hit your ball. I’ll meet you on the green.”

  Charlie and I each reached the green in three shots. I was away. As I lined up my putt, Charlie said, “I was going to give this priest the secret of the V’s. But he was kinda steaming, so I figured maybe he wasn’t in the most receptive mood. I mean, he scoops his ball out of that trap, looks like a great shot, and the ball hits the green and takes a ninety-degree roll to the left, like there was a magnet or something in it. And the priest, he can’t help himself, he practically screams, ‘Aw, shit!’ The nun crosses herself, and the poor guy, he’s really chagrined. He looks at the sky and says in his loud voice, ‘Strike me down if I curse again.’ Okay. I’m away, I roll it up close and tap in for my bogie. The nun, she’s lying about the same distance as you are now, and she gets down in two also. Then it’s the priest’s turn. He lines it up and strikes it nice and firm. The ball rolls right for hole, and guess what?”

  “It rolls to the left,” I said.

  “It sure as hell did. Straight as a die right up to the hole, then boom, it darts off to the left. The priest can’t believe it. ‘Shit!’ he yells. Well, Brady, I’m standing there kinda stunned, you know, and suddenly overhead comes this huge black cloud. And there’s the rumble of thunder, and the sun disappears, and then I hear this crack and a big bolt of lightning comes shooting down, straight for the poor priest. Suddenly it veers off to the left and zaps the nun, turning her into a smoldering cinder. And this deep, heavenly voice booms out, ‘Aw, shit.’

  I stepped away from my putt and stared at Charlie. “Imagine there’s a point to that story, somewhere.”

  “I don’t know, Brady. It’s just something that happened to me.”

  I squeaked out a one-up victory over Charlie and his newly aligned V’s, and he bought the beers in the clubhouse. Tommy Porter joined us briefly, but when he realized Charlie had conceded the argument on racehorses he wandered away.

  I told Charlie the sad tale of Alice Sylvester and about Buddy Baron’s mysterious disappearance and reappearance and re-disappearance.

  “Lot of crack around,” observed Charlie. “It does things to people.”

  “You guys have any handle on what’s going on in Boston?”

  Charlie was a lawyer for the United States Justice Department’s Boston office. He had prosecuted plenty of drug importers. He shook his head. “Not really, to be honest. The stuff is so portable, so easy to make. And the business is so damn sophisticated, now. We nailed one bunch, the head guy had an MBA from Harvard. We’ve mostly gotten the middlemen. There are links to New York, Providence, Newark, even Miami. But, truthfully, so far they’ve got the jump on us. This crack is bad stuff, believe me.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “I don’t like what I see happening in Windsor Harbor.”

  “It stinks,” he agreed.

  We talked baseball for a while, and Charlie invited me to his house for dinner, which I declined. Instead, I stopped at Bannister’s in Stow for a thick hunk of tenderloin. I lingered over my coffee, and it was nearly eleven when I finally got home.

  I parked in the basement garage and sat there for a moment. Friday night. Sylvie was in New York to confer with her agent. I’d get right to bed. Tomorrow would be Saturday. Bluefishing with Doc Adams.

  I dragged my clubs from my car to the elevator, glided up to the sixth floor, and dragged them to my door. I unlocked it and snapped on the light.

  The first thing I noticed was a strange odor in my apartment. It reminded me of burnt pork.

  The second thing I noticed was Buddy Baron. He was seated at my kitchen table. His body was erect, but his chin was slumped on his chest.

  Buddy looked dead.

  Eight

  HE HAD BEEN TIED to one of my high-backed kitchen chairs with a length of nylon fly line off one of my reels, several turns around his chest under his arms and half a dozen more turns around his throat, snug to the chair back. His face was the color of a ripe eggplant. A check of his pulse confirmed what I already knew. Buddy Baron was indeed dead.

  I called the police and figured I would have ten or fifteen minutes alone with Buddy.

  “You shouldn’t have left,” I told his body. I slammed my fist onto the top of the table. “Dammit. I should have taken you in the other night.”

  Buddy had nothing to say.

  I sat down across from him. “You were afraid, weren’t you? That’s why you left. I guess you had good reason. And here we all are—yeah, me too—hell, even your old man—suspecting you of killing poor Alice. This is my fault. All I can do for you now is try to vindicate you. For what that may be worth.”

  Buddy did not answer me.

  My toaster was on the table, its cord stretched to a wall socket. That was not where I kept it. I picked up one of Buddy’s hands. His arms still hung limply at his sides. He couldn’t have been dead for long. No rigor mortis yet. The fingers on his right hand were blackened and blistered. I could visualize what had happened. The toaster had been turned on and Buddy’s fingers shoved inside of it. He had been tortured. I wondered what his killer had hoped to learn from him.

  I wondered if he had been successful.

  I went out onto my little balcony to stare at the night and see what answers lay out there. I found mostly questions.

  Buddy had left two nights ago. I supposed he’d taken a key from the drawer where he’d found the chess pieces. He had left with the intention of returning. He’d left with a purpose, not just to avoid jail. But what had he been after? And had he found it? It seemed clear to me that he’d hoped to learn something about Alice Sylvester’s murder. He’d had an idea he wanted to confirm, or to find evidence to support.

  Had his killer followed him to my apartment? Or had he come here to wait for Buddy? Or—a sudden thought—had the murderer come to wait for me, making Buddy a tragic victim of circumstance?

  But if the killer had come for me, why?

  Questions. No answers.

  The buzzer rang. I went to answer it. It was Hector, informing me that a gang of policemen were on their way up.

  The next hour or so was a blur of questions, mostly the same questions over and over. And most of my answers were “I don’t know.”

  The medical examiner deduced that Buddy had indeed been tortured by someone burning his fingers in the toaster, and that he had died by strangulation. The M.E. speculated that the pain in Buddy’s fingers had caused him to strain against the fly line bound tightly around his throat, which, in turn, constricted his windpipe until he suffocated.

  Afte
r photos were taken they untied Buddy’s body, laid it into a plastic body bag, and took it away. Most of the cops departed, leaving only a team of forensics guys and a state police detective named Horowitz. Horowitz was a soft-spoken man about my age who ruminated nervously on a big wad of bubble gum. He wore wrinkled chino pants and a short-sleeved white shirt with a little blue bow tie. He looked like a travel agent, not a cop.

  I had spent most of this time seated on the sofa in my living room smoking cigarettes. Horowitz came over and sat beside me.

  “Who’s Eddy Curry?” he said.

  “Curry? He’s Tom Baron’s campaign manager. Why?”

  Horwitz shifted his cud of gum from his left to his right cheek. “Why would Curry come here?” he said.

  “As far as I know, Curry doesn’t even know where I live. I can think of no reason why he’d come here. What’s Curry got to do with this?”

  Horowitz called over his shoulder to one of the forensics guys. “Get that guard in here, willya?”

  A minute later the plainclothes cop returned with Hector. He wore a gray shirt and dark blue pants and a badge. He carried no weapon. Hector’s eyes darted around the room. When they lit on me, he looked relieved.

  “C’mere,” said Horowitz.

  Hector came and stood in front of us. “Sit down,” said Horowitz.

  Hector sat on the edge of the chair next to the sofa.

  “Tell it again.”

  “The boy come back maybe eight o’clock,” he said. His right knee jiggled as if he were trying to shake off a swarm of killer ants. “Same boy come the other night, okay? I call up, like always. This time you not home.” Hector lifted his black eyebrows to me. “The boy, he say he wanna wait for you, you give him a key. I figure he was here before, he’s okay, right? He show me his key, see, and I know he’s your friend. I fuck up, huh?”

  I waved my hand. “No. No problem. It’s okay.”

  “Did you give the boy a key?” said Horowitz to me.

  I shook my head. “No. No, I didn’t. But I know where he got it, I think. I’ve got a drawer full of junk. Including spare keys. He must’ve seen them when he was getting the chess set. He probably grabbed a bunch of them after I went to bed and tried them. He must’ve been planning to come back all along.”