The Marine Corpse
A Brady Coyne Mystery
William G. Tapply
For Martha
Contents
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
Preview: Dead Meat
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
FELIX GUERRERO HUNKERED DOWN into the beige windbreaker he had stolen from the big department store and wondered why the hell he had ever let Paulo talk him into leaving Miami.
The sign outside the bank near Faneuil Hall told him it was minus four degrees centigrade outside. Dirty, hard mounds of week-old snow lay against the buildings and edged the sidewalks. Puddles of frozen slush glittered dully in the reflected yellow light from the phony gas lamps that illuminated the brick-paved plaza. Felix was wearing low-cut sneakers. For speed. Good, leather New Balance. Also stolen. His toes ached from the cold. It was muy frio in Boston. Very damn cold. Nothing like Miami. Nothing like Cuba.
The sign blinked, and then it told Felix the time: 6:42 PM. He had another eighteen minutes to wait before the man would arrive.
There wouldn’t be much of a crowd, they had told him. Just enough for him to lose himself, but not so many people that he wouldn’t be able to run. He’d be able to get close to the man.
Felix kept his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He had to keep them warm. His right finger caressed the trigger of the little square automatic they had given him. A lady’s gun, he had called it. But they told him that it was clean and it would do the trick, and he should shut up.
He kept his finger on the trigger, rubbing it lightly, lovingly, the way he would rub a woman’s nipple to make it grow hard.
Get close to him, they had told him. When he gets out of the black limo, just walk up to him. Smile, as if you wanted to shake his hand. When you are standing in front of him, take out the little automatic and stick it at him and yell the words—be sure to yell the words, they told Felix, that was very important—and start pulling the trigger. Then run away. Run for the crowds of people and they won’t shoot you. Go around the building and turn down the alley. Run to the end of the alley. A car will be waiting. Get into the car. You’ll be in Miami the next day.
Felix had walked through it that morning. He knew where the alley was.
He hugged himself and shuffled his feet. Maldito! It was cold. He made fists, rubbing his fingers together inside his pockets. He couldn’t do the job if his hands were numb.
But it sounded easy enough. Already it was dark outside, and the people were beginning to gather there, their breaths coming in little white puffs. They were young, most of them, jolly and fat and full from expensive meals in fancy restaurants, and now they were gathering to see the man with the pig face that Felix was going to kill. Men and women, just hanging around in their expensive, warm coats, furs and big wool topcoats and colorful ski parkas. Felix thought he should have stolen a ski parka.
He patted his shirt pocket. The thin envelope crinkled. A comforting thing, that envelope. It contained five big ones. There were five more to come after he finished the job. And then the sunshine and all the niñas guapas, the pretty white girls on the white beach, and a few lines in the evening for his nose and some good Jamaican weed and he wouldn’t be cold anymore.
Felix would buy himself a tight little black bikini bathing suit to show the niñas on the beach what he had. He’d wear a big gold cross and stroll up and down the white sand, and the girls would see him and he’d look them over and pick one out.
Cousin Paulo had said there’d be work in Boston. Chinga cousin Paulo. Fuck him. There was nothing in Boston but snow and snotty dried-up women with zippers between their legs and big black dudes who liked to beat up little Cubans.
Now Felix had a job. It was work he knew well enough. It was work he’d done before.
Just like Americans, thought Felix, to make speeches on a day of national disgrace. Pearl Harbor Day! The day the Japs kicked the mierda out of the American Navy. And they celebrate it with speeches by important men like the one with the pig face.
Cuba had a day like that. The day of Babia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. Felix wondered why the Americans didn’t celebrate that one, too.
The man with the pig face, they had told Felix, was an important man, mucho hombre, a man of the government, and Felix would be a big hero when he killed him. They had tried to explain it to Felix, that the man was going to tell why the Americans were giving weapons to the government of Haiti to kill the guerillas. These guerillas were young men just like Felix, they had explained, so this man was an enemy of Felix and an enemy of Cuba and an enemy of the great communist revolution in Haiti.
Chinga these Haitian guerillas. Chinga their revolution. Chinga this pig-faced man who wanted to make a speech in the old square brick building in Boston. All Felix wanted to do was get away from this frozen hellhole of a city where everybody wanted to kick his ass and Cousin Paulo was in jail and therefore unable to introduce Felix to the men who would pay him to carry drugs.
He turned up the collar of his thin windbreaker and shivered. The sign told him that the temperature had dropped another degree. Tan frio. Too damn cold. It was 6:56. He eased himself closer to the front entrance of the building. His finger lightly stroked the trigger of the little gun in his pocket.
Two uniformed policemen stood by the steps. Warm orange light shone through the windows of the building. The policemen looked cold and bored, as if they’d rather be inside. Felix tried to look bored, too. He didn’t have to try to look cold.
The two black limos pulled up, close to the steps, closer to the entrance to the building than Felix had expected. A tall man with a child perched on his shoulders stepped up beside him, and he could feel people pushing up in back of him. They had seen the limos, and they were gathering around to see the man with the pig face.
They had shown him a picture of the man. He was an old man with round pink cheeks and a flattened-out nose and white hair and tiny eyes. A pig-faced man, Felix had looked at the picture for a minute and nodded. He wouldn’t forget the face. The man’s name, they told him, was Thurmond Lampley. Felix had shrugged. He didn’t care what the man’s name was. He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, they told him. Felix rolled his eyes. He was an enemy of the brave guerillas in Haiti, they continued, an enemy of Castro, an enemy of Cuba, and Felix didn’t even bother to tell them that he didn’t give a shit who the man was or what he believed.
They told him it would be a good and brave thing to kill this pig-faced man. Felix remembered what he had said. “I do not hate this man,” he had said. “But I am happy to kill him. Tengo cojones.” I have plenty of balls.
The one thousand dollars, the trip back to Miami, these were the things that made Felix happy to kill this Thurmond Lampley with the pig face.
The first one out of the limo was a big blond man without a topcoat or a hat. He stood there for a moment, not smiling, looking all around. Felix saw him nod to the policemen and then bend back to the open door of the limo. Then the man with the pig face climbed out. The blond man stood straight and looked around some more. He stared right at Felix. It seemed that he was staring right into Felix’s soul, and Felix eased himself back behind the tall man with the child on his shoulders.
When Felix looked again, the blond man was no longer staring at him.
The man with the pig face was smiling at the crowd and at the same time speaking to another man who was standing beside him. “Chinga tu madre,” cursed Felix under his breath, trying to hate the man, because that always made it easier.
Then the pig-faced man and the two others began walking toward the building. They had only a few steps to go. If they made it into the building, Felix would have missed his chance.
“Excuse me, please,” mumbled Felix to the tall man in front of him. The tall man glanced down, smiled, said something to the child on his shoulders, and moved aside. Felix stepped forward, gripping the gun in his pocket, and began to run toward the man with the pig face.
“Haiti libra!” he yelled, as they had told him to. And he yelled it again as he took out the gun and pointed it at the man. He saw the startled look on the pig face, a flash of fear that Felix liked to see. But then the blond man turned and calmly stepped in the way. Felix pointed his gun. As he yanked on the trigger, something pushed him from behind, and Felix felt his foot slip on some ice and his shots went into the air. “Mierda!” he muttered. He tried to stop, to regain his balance. He felt hands clutching at him, and he saw the blond man reaching inside his jacket.
Felix managed to turn and darted back into the crowd of people, who moved quickly to step aside for him. He didn’t feel cold, now. He felt warm and alive and he moved quickly. The crowds seemed to open a pathway for him, and he followed it across the brick-paved plaza, around the building, and there were no bullets coming after him.
He was running very fast, feeling strong. He came to the alley. It was dark and deserted. At the end would be the car, waiting for him. He heard shouts behind him, noise, confusion, anger in the voices. But he would make it. He was running well, the way he would run on the hard-packed sand along the water’s edge on the beaches, knees high and elbows pumping, head up, breathing easy, all the muscles of his good hard body working together.
He was nearing the end of the alley where the car would be waiting for him. He looked. The car was there, and two men stood beside it. He could see the exhaust coming from the back of the car, a big gray cloud in the cold air.
He slowed to a jog. He would make it easily. When he was about twenty-five feet from the car he began to walk, a nice, slow, cocky stroll, like on the beach in Miami. The two men were grinning at him, saying something, he couldn’t hear what. Felix grinned back at them. “Haiti libra,” he said, the password, so they’d know it was him for sure.
The two men, still smiling and speaking to him in loud voices he couldn’t understand, showed him the guns they held in their hands. Big, ugly revolvers with short snouts and wide bores. Felix stopped, hesitated, started to speak. He held out his hands to the two men. One of his hands, he suddenly realized, still held the little square automatic. He opened his mouth to explain. The two men were pointing their guns at him.
“Chingado!” Felix muttered, seeing it all now. “I’ve been fucked!”
He whirled around and began to run back down the alley. He heard shouts behind him, more voices ahead of him. He ran harder. He heard the first shot, loud in the narrow alley, and he felt it shatter his elbow and spin his body through the air.
He didn’t hear the second shot, because the bullet got there before the sound registered in his brain, and it shattered his shoulderblade and crashed through his chest and killed him before his body landed in the dirty snow.
That, as well as I can reconstruct it, is how Felix Guerrero died. The newspapers, with their usual instinct for irony, called him “The Happy Warrior.” Mickey Gillis, in her thrice-weekly column for the Globe, hinted darkly at conspiracies and cover-ups. But the government did not see fit to respond to her hints—which, in turn, gave Mickey fodder for another series of columns.
The attempted assassination of Thurmond Lampley at the annual Pearl Harbor Day Public Forum at Faneuil Hall was big news for a long time, because it finally confirmed our government’s claim that Cuba was involved in the Haitian revolution. Thurmond Lampley gave his speech as scheduled. He appeared a bit shaken, according to reporters who were there. But he didn’t forget to emphasize the Cuban role in Haiti.
Lampley was a big hero. So, in his way, was Felix Guerrero.
Stuart Richmond Carver died less than a month later, also in Boston. He got no headlines at all—partly because of the intercessions of his uncle, former United States Senator Benjamin Woodhouse, and partly because Stu’s wasn’t a very interesting death.
But Stu Carver’s death was more interesting to me, because he was my friend and my client.
ONE
HOMICIDE DETECTIVE AL SANTIS hung up the phone and sighed. He jammed his forefinger into the styrofoam cup on his desk, frowned, and wiped it on the front of his shirt. “Cold,” he muttered to himself. “Figures. Story of my miserable life. Cold coffee. Cold bodies. Cold trails. Cold women.” He belched into his fist. “’Scuse me,” he said. “My digestion ain’t so hot these days, either.”
He snapped the plastic cap back onto the cup and dropped it into the wastebasket beside his desk. He ran his fingers through what was left of his hair and peered at me. “I kept you waiting. Couldn’t be helped. That damn shooting at Faneuil Hall’s got us all jumping, you know?”
“That was a month ago,” I said.
He shrugged and nodded, as if to say that he’d prefer to get on to more important things than an attempt on the life of a Deputy Secretary of State. “Jurisdictions, see?” he said. “You got your Secret Service, you got your FBI, you got your State cops, and then you got us City cops, all tryin’ to figure out which of the other guys fucked up the worst. Spend more time these days fighting among ourselves than we do trying to catch bad guys.” He put both hands to his head and pressed against his temples. “Driving me nuts, I’ll tell you. Anyway, where were we?”
“Stuart Carver.”
“Yeah. Right. The stiff we found New Year’s. What was I saying?”
“You didn’t say anything, actually. I came in and introduced myself and then the phone rang and then you got up and left and fifteen minutes later you came back in with your coffee and the phone rang again and you said ‘Yes, sir’ into it several times. Then you put your finger into your coffee.”
Santis grinned. “And it was cold already. Yeah, yeah. Right. And you’re the dead guy’s lawyer or something. Coyne, it was, right?”
“Brady Coyne. Yes.”
“Okay. I got it right here.” He rummaged through a drawer in his desk and came up with a manila folder. He opened it and glanced through the papers in it. “See, we thought it was just another wino. Naturally. I mean, there he was, laying under some newspapers in the alley, frozen stiff as a haddock, wearing this raggedy old coat, and them eyes staring up at the sky. There was no blood or bruises. He was just laying there.”
“Frozen,” I said. “Sure.”
“Hell, the Medical Examiner came and looked at him. You know, didn’t really examine him. It was colder’n a witch’s tit out and only like five A.M. in the morning. But the ME kinda tried to move his head around, felt of his fingers a little, went through his pockets. Routine, understand? Didn’t find much, naturally. You don’t expect to, these bums. No engraved gold watches or billfolds with credit cards or college rings. Okay, he coulda been rolled. Even so, those boys’ll kill each other for half a jug of Guinea red quicker’n they’ll say please, and those shitbum teenagers do it just for fun. But, you look at this one, you figure he just lay down and froze to death. Another dead bum. With that beard and them old clothes—shit, he had newspaper in his shoes, no socks—you know? First of the year, but there’ll be plenty more. Cold weather’s here now, missions’re filled up, they go get boozed up so they feel warm, then they pass out in the alleys. Routine, you figure.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said.
“I ain’t apologizing,” said Santis. “Explaining. See, every winter we get ten, maybe twelve, just like this one. Mostly old guys, though nowadays it’s a little different. W
e get women too, now, and even young guys like this one, since they started letting them out of the nuthouses. The home-guard, they call themselves. Lots of ’em born right here in Boston. ‘The homeless,’ as the Welfare folks call them. But that ain’t necessarily right. They are home. This is their home, the streets and the alleys, the parking garages, the subways. We get more in the summer, the tramps and the bindle stiffs. They come in on the freights from Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis. They like Boston. We got lots of churches and missions and clinics and whatnot. Nice weather here in the summer. Nice benches on the Common, lotta nice people to give ’em handouts, lotta nice squished vegetables down at the marketplace. Boston’s a good city if you happen to be a bum, especially in the summer. Most of ’em tend to head south in the winter. Those that stay around tend to freeze to death in the winter. Like your friend there.”
“Stuart Carver was my client.”
Santis shrugged.
“Stu Carver wasn’t a bum,” I said.
“Well, that depends on your definition, I’d say. He damn well looked like one when we found him. Now, understand, this is technically a Medical Examiner’s case. Unattended death. Usually they lay around in the morgue at City Hospital for a few days. Then Welfare buries ’em. Oh, they’ll send the guy’s fingerprints to Washington. That’s routine. Maybe he was somebody. Usually not. Anyhow, coupla days later it comes back. He was the Senator’s nephew. That changed things a little.”
“I imagine that changed things a lot.” I observed.
Santis nodded. “The Senator still pulls a lot of strings in this city. But, hey, it ain’t our fault his nephew went on the skids.”
I took a pack of Winstons from my shirt pocket, tapped one out, hesitated, and said, “Do you mind?”
He waved his hand. “Naw. Go ahead.”
I lit the cigarette. “So when you learned it was Stuart Carver…?”
“When we learned it was Senator Woodhouse’s nephew, somebody suggested that maybe the ME ought to do an autopsy.”
Marine Corpse Page 1
