Vulgar Boatman

by William G. Tapply

“Indeed. A memorable day. A significant day. I wasn’t aware that we acknowledged this day as some sort of holiday. We haven’t exactly celebrated it. We never exchanged cards, sent flowers—”

  “Well, I was thinking that we should.”

  “Send flowers?”

  “Celebrate it. Or acknowledge it. Consider it an important day.”

  “Well, then, happy anniversary of our divorce, Gloria, and many more.”

  “Don’t be facile, Brady Coyne.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She chuckled. “You used to say that a lot.”

  “I had a lot to be sorry about. I was not a very good husband.”

  “To me, you weren’t. But that was mostly me. You were okay.”

  “What is this, Gloria?”

  “I thought we should celebrate. That’s all.” She paused. There was apology in her voice.

  “Why?”

  “Do you remember what we did that day?”

  There had been no animosity, I remembered that. We had walked out of the courthouse with our lawyers. On the sidewalk out front, while rain misted down and glazed the street, our attorneys shook hands all around and walked away. Gloria and I remained standing there, reluctant, for some reason, to make the final parting.

  “Well,” I had said.

  Gloria’s smile was small. “Well.”

  “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “It’s not like we won’t be seeing each other,” she said. “The boys. You’ll be around.”

  “Of course.”

  “I bet there are a lot of things we have forgotten about.”

  “I did leave some books I want at the house.”

  “Sure. Just come by anytime.”

  “And look, hon. If money is ever a problem…”

  She nodded quickly. “It’s a generous settlement. You were very kind.”

  “It wasn’t like it was really adversarial, after all.”

  “No.”

  Suddenly we became awkward. I lit a cigarette. Something to do. Gloria looked at her watch. She smiled brightly up at me. “Well, the single woman with no plans for lunch.”

  I hunched into my topcoat. “The single lawyer with no lunch date, either.”

  We went to the Iruña, a little Spanish place just off Harvard Square. We had a fruity red wine, clicked glasses, and agreed that it was a silly thing for us to do. Gloria ordered an avocado stuffed with seafood. I had a bowl of paella. We sampled from each other’s spoon. We finished the bottle of wine. Then we went to my car and—on what pretext I can’t recall—drove to my new little studio apartment on Beacon Street.

  We made love on the rented pullout sofa, and afterward Gloria cried and I held her familiar body close and promised I’d never abandon her. And when we made love the second time, it was as if it had never happened before. I found new hollows along her back, a different roundness to her belly, a startling hunger in her mouth.

  We both recognized it. We knew we had lost something that we could never recover. We were saying good-bye. It wasn’t easy.

  And since that day we had kept our awkward distance from each other. We avoided being alone together. The telephone connected us. Sometimes we went places with the boys. We met at parties, funerals, graduations. We acknowledged that we liked each other. Sometimes the line got blurry. Usually it was I who drew it sharp again.

  “I remember the day very well, hon. It was a long time ago.”

  “Eight years. Exactly.”

  “A lot has changed.”

  “Yes. It has. I was thinking…”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “The Iruña is still there,” she said quickly. “It would be—”

  “It would be dumb.”

  I didn’t recognize the sound I heard. It was muffled. It took me a moment to realize that she had covered the receiver. It was a sigh of exasperation. Or anger. Or it might have been a sob.

  “Look, Gloria.”

  “You are a first-class prick, Brady Coyne. All I wanted to do was have a civilized lunch with a man I like. An old friend. And you, you’re thinking we’re still where we were eight years ago.” She blew out her breath quickly. It hissed in my ear. It reminded me of the natural-childbirth classes we had taken together before Billy was born. “I don’t know about you, but I’m in a different place now. And if you can’t handle it, well—”

  “Hey,” I said. “Whoa. You’re right. I spoke without thinking.”

  “The Iruña at noon, then,” she said.

  “You’re bullying me, Gloria.”

  “For a change.”

  I laughed. “Okay. What the hell. Maybe we should go easy on the wine this time, though.”

  “Maybe,” she said softly, “we shouldn’t.”

  I replaced the receiver gently and leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced together behind my head. It would be dumb, I had said. I was right. Picking at old scabs that had been hardening for eight years. Dumb.

  I sighed. I would be jovial, distant. I would creep carefully around the sores that still festered. Delay, misdirection, evasion. Good lawyer’s tricks. I could handle it.

  The telephone buzzed. I picked it up. “Yes, Julie?”

  “You’ve got a call. She’s been holding. We should’ve had music for her.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Rebecca Katz?” It was a question.

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Well, that’s all I can tell you. Maybe someone you picked up on Washington Street?”

  “I don’t lurk around Washington Street, Julie.”

  “She sounds agitated. I’ll put her through.”

  There was a click. I said into the phone, “This is Brady Coyne.”

  “Mr. Coyne, this is Becca Katz.”

  I hesitated. “Yes?”

  “Lester’s wife.”

  “Oh, sure. What can I do for you?”

  “The other day Les mentioned that he had retained you. You’re his lawyer?”

  Les had given me ten dollars. I had given him advice. It was not my usual business arrangement. “Yes,” I told his wife. “What’s up?”

  “He wants to speak to you. You’re the only one he’ll talk to. He’s—”

  “So put him on, Mrs. Katz.”

  There was a long pause. When she finally spoke, I detected a tension in her voice that I hadn’t noticed before. “I can’t put him on, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Well…”

  “I’m at the hospital. Les was unconscious for around thirty hours. He just came out of it. He asked for you. ‘Brady,’ he said. ‘Gotta talk to Brady.’ The policeman came in. Les wouldn’t talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to me. ‘Get me Brady,’ he said. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”

  “Jesus, Mrs. Katz. What happened?”

  “Hit-and-run. Right in front of our house. Wednesday night. Actually, Thursday morning. He had been working. Just gotten home. He’s—his skull is fractured. Pelvis broken. Lots of internal damage. Bleeding. They don’t know. They did some kind of emergency operation. He’s been too critical for them to do much else. He wants you. Can you come?”

  “Of course,” I said. “What hospital?”

  “Mass General. Please. Hurry.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I grabbed my topcoat. “I have to go over to Mass General,” I told Julie on my way out.

  “What about our problem?”

  “Huh?”

  “The music.”

  “You were right. Ray Conniff. It’s what people expect.”

  3

  A CAB TOOK ME over to Mass General. By the time I had negotiated lobbies, elevators, and corridors and found the intensive-care unit, nearly an hour had passed from the time of Becca Katz’s call.

  A nurse sat behind a barricade, facing a bank of computer monitors. Dots and lines bounced across the screens, beeping and humming rhythmically. She had her head down, studying some papers. She had thick wrists. She wore no rings on her fingers.

 
; I cleared my throat. She ignored me.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She looked up. Her face was surprisingly young and delicate. “Yes?”

  “My name is Coyne. I’m looking for Lester Katz.”

  A hand touched my shoulder. I turned. A policeman was standing there. “You’re Coyne?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Katz called me.”

  He steered me away from the nurses’ station with a gentle hand on my elbow. I caught the nurse’s eye for an instant. She gave me a small shake of her head.

  In a corner were arranged two small sofas, upholstered florally. A square table held scattered copies of old Newsweek magazines. I sat with the policeman.

  “I’m Kerrigan,” he said. “I was the first one at the scene.”

  “Les…?”

  He shook his head. “He died about fifteen minutes ago. I’m sorry.”

  I fumbled for a cigarette, a reflex. Kerrigan touched my arm and pointed to a No Smoking sign. I shrugged and put the pack back into my pocket. “What happened?” I said.

  “He was conscious for only a couple of minutes. Asked for you. That was it. Blood clots in his brain. The doctors said it was inevitable. Nothing they could do.”

  “Shit,” I mumbled.

  Officer Kerrigan had thick, curly red hair and a skimpy mustache of a slightly darker shade. He had startling blue eyes, round and clear as a baby’s. He was a young man. To me, he looked like a teenager. He was probably twenty-five. A patch on his uniform read “Somerville Police.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Katz?” I said.

  “A doctor took her somewhere. I suppose there are papers to be signed. Authorization for an autopsy. Permission to take his organs, maybe.” He shrugged.

  “She told me it was hit-and-run.”

  He nodded. “I got the call. Two fifty-four a.m. Took me only a minute or two to get there. Weird scene. Middle of the night, dead of winter, just the two of them there in the street.”

  “Her and Les?”

  He ran his forefinger over his mustache, as if it were new and he wasn’t used to it. “She was the one who called it in. Then she went out, put a blanket over him. She’s sitting there on the street holding his head in her lap, getting blood all over her like Jackie Kennedy, there. He was a mess, Mr. Coyne. I never saw anything like it. I’ve talked to some of the other guys. They say you get used to it, but I don’t know.” He looked up, appealing to me. “I just came on the force a few months ago. They don’t prepare you for this in school.”

  “Did she see it happen?”

  “She said she was in bed but not asleep. He was working, A private detective, you know. Worked odd hours, I guess. She said she never slept until he came home. Said she heard the thump. The car hitting him. That was the first thing she heard.”

  “No horn, no squeal of brakes?”

  He shook his head. “No. Of course, she may not be that reliable. She’s been pretty upset. She might’ve been dozing when it happened. But she doesn’t remember any other sound. Just that thump.”

  “Then what?” I said gently as Kerrigan’s eyes wavered.

  “Then she called the police. Then she threw on a robe, grabbed a blanket, and ran out there. I was there in a couple of minutes, like I said, and the ambulance came right along. Brought him here. She came in the ambulance. I followed in my cruiser a little later.”

  “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  He nodded. “I cleared it. Figured, if he came to I could talk to him. See what I could learn from his wife. The chief said it was a good idea.”

  “And you cared.”

  He smiled. “Doing my job.”

  “Right. So you figure this was a routine hit-and-run?”

  “Routine?”

  I waved my hand. “So to speak.”

  “Well, it’s obviously a hit-and-run. Somebody hit him and kept going. I’m not sure what’s routine. Why? You got a different idea?”

  I hesitated. “No. Not really.”

  “What do you mean, not really?”

  “Nothing. I don’t have a different idea. So how do you reconstruct what happened?”

  Kerrigan sat back. I had gentled him onto more familiar ground, the abstractions of tape-measured distances, estimates of speed and time, profiles of bodies chalked onto pavement, names and addresses of witnesses. Forensic detail. The humdrum, mundane stuff that allows men who must confront death to deal with it.

  “Mr. Katz parked on the north side of Chestnut Street, across from his house. He was just starting to cross when he was hit by a car traveling east. He was thrown forward and sideward against another parked car. It was right under a streetlight. The road had some icy patches on it, but basically it was clear. No skid marks. As near as we could reconstruct it, the car caught him at the hips. Smashed his pelvis, ruptured his spleen, and God knows what else. Lots of internal damage, I guess. Had all kinds of tubes going in and out of him. Then when he hit the parked car it fractured his skull. They operated on his spleen, which saved his life for a short time. I guess there was so much swelling in his brain that they couldn’t do much except drill some holes and hope for the best. The doctor said it was like a miracle he had that couple of minutes of consciousness. When he asked for you.” Kerrigan regarded me solemnly with those innocent blue eyes. “Why would he ask for you, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Well,” I began. And then I stopped. I was about to tell Kerrigan about my conversation with Les at Hung Moon’s restaurant. As the story flitted through my mind, I realized it sounded irrelevant. “Well,” I repeated, “I was his lawyer. And we were friends. Who knows what was going through his mind in the condition he was in.”

  Kerrigan stared at me for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Why would Les park across the street, do you suppose?” I asked, just to divert the policeman from inquiring further into my relationship with Les.

  “I asked Mrs. Katz that. She said that he kept odd hours, and the others who live in the building—it’s a four-family house—they’d get parked in if he used the driveway. There’s parking on one side only on that street in the winter.”

  “You’re sure he was getting out of his car, not on his way to get in?”

  “That’s what she said. She said he was coming home.”

  “Did she know where he’d been?”

  He shook his head. “She said she didn’t know that much about his work. He had jobs. Following people. You know what he did. She said she didn’t like what he did, didn’t want to know about it. Do you think it matters?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “If there’s something we should know, Mr. Coyne…”

  “If I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

  Kerrigan narrowed his eyes. It matured him instantly. “You think Mr. Katz was murdered, don’t you?”

  “I think it’s possible, someone in his line of work. Bound to have enemies.”

  He nodded. “I think it’s possible, too. Someone hits someone by accident, their first instinct is to stop. Even if they’re drunk, they’ll hit the brakes. Driving away, that’s a conscious decision, not a reaction. The thing is, Mrs. Katz didn’t hear anything that would indicate a car had stopped and then started up again. She said she jumped right out of bed and went to the window. Got there within seconds of hearing that godawful thump. She didn’t see a car. Not even a flash of taillights. This guy didn’t even slow down.” He shrugged. “I’m new at this. But I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the past thirty-six hours. I’ve been thinking about nothing else.”

  I took a deep breath. I desperately wanted a cigarette. “Look,” I said. “Les blackmailed somebody earlier this week.”

  Kerrigan’s eyebrows arched. “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” I summarized my conversation with Les.

  When I was done, Kerrigan sighed. “It’s not much, is it?”

  “It’s something.”

  “I’m not exactly in a position to spend a lot of time on this
.” He flapped his hands in apology. “We’ve got no witnesses at all. There was just that thump. Not enough to wake anybody up. Even when the ambulance got there, nobody came out of their house. I’ve talked with the lieutenant a couple of times since I’ve been here. He says, something like this, usually a guy has a chance to think about it, sober up, he turns himself in. Or somebody else does. They see the dent in his car, they hear what happened, they know the guy was out late, came home drunk. Or there was somebody in the car with him, doesn’t want to get in trouble. So they give the cops an anonymous call. Point is, Mr. Coyne, investigations sound nice. All that fancy television stuff, with computers and whatnot. But what gets crimes solved most of the time is somebody telling on somebody else, or somebody turning themselves in. So the message I’m getting here is, I’ve done a nice job, done about all I can do, but with no witnesses, no kind of evidence at all, it’s time to get on with things.” He turned down the corners of his mouth and arched his eyebrows.

  “What I just told you,” I said. “That changes things, doesn’t it?”

  He smiled doubtfully. “I’ll run it past the lieutenant. If you had a name…”

  “Maybe I can come up with it.”

  Kerrigan glanced past my shoulder. “Oh, oh,” he said.

  I turned. A doctor was standing by the nurse’s station, leaning back with an elbow cocked up on the counter. He was talking with a woman. “Rebecca Katz?” I said.

  Kerrigan nodded.

  She was short and slender, with a boyish haircut. She was looking up at the doctor as he talked, nodding and flashing perfunctory smiles. The doctor made a gesture with his hand, and she watched it move, as if it held a weapon.

  After a moment, the doctor straightened, touched her shoulder lightly, turned, and moved behind the counter, where he bent and conferred with the thick-wristed nurse. Rebecca Katz looked around. Her eyes settled on me and Kerrigan.

  Kerrigan stood up and beckoned to her. I stood also, and she came toward us.

  She went directly to Kerrigan, ignoring me. “Well, that’s it,” she said to him. She had a husky voice for such a small body. Up close, I noticed the lines etched onto her face and the streaks of gray in her sandy hair.

  “This is Mr. Coyne,” said Kerrigan.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were another policeman. Officer Kerrigan has been such a big help.” She held out her hand to me. “I’m happy to meet Lester’s attorney. I hope you’ll—”