Marine Corpse

by William G. Tapply

  The priest moved behind his desk, bent over, and came up with a shopping bag, the kind with twine handles. He handed it to me. “Altoona’s stuff,” he said. “There was a cap and scarf in there, which I forgot to mention to you on the phone. I gave them to a poor fellow who was as bald as Altoona.”

  “Good,” I said. “I gave that cap and scarf to him for Christmas.”

  “Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t have given them away.”

  “No. That’s fine. I’m glad you did.”

  He smiled. “Thank you.”

  We left the office and walked back toward the front door, where two men were still waiting for their turn in Dr. Vance’s clinic. “Well, thank you for thinking of me,” I said to the priest. “I was very fond of Altoona, as you know.”

  “Are you in a hurry, Mr. Coyne?”

  I glanced at my new watch, a cheap Timex that I wouldn’t mind having stolen off my wrist. It was a couple of minutes after twelve. “No, not really. Why?”

  “Would you like to talk?”

  I shrugged. “Sure, if you want.”

  “Good. Look, I’ve got to get back to the clinic for a minute. The fellow in there’s in really bad shape. Looks like advanced liver disease. Dr. Vance wants to get him admitted to the hospital, but he needs to pry some data out of him. We’re almost done. Those other fellows are just waiting for their medication, so he doesn’t need me for them. I’ll just be a few minutes. Okay?”

  I nodded and took the paper bag that contained all of Altoona’s earthly possessions into the dayroom. I put the bag on a table and peered inside. There were three wood carvings. One had been completed, a miniature decoy, a teal, so exquisitely carved that it looked feather-soft. The other two were roughed out but recognizable—a female torso, and the head and shoulders of what looked like a German shepherd. Both struck my untrained eye as perfectly proportioned. The man had had a talent.

  I glanced through the books. They were mostly old, tattered, and evidently well-read paperbacks. In addition to several novels by authors I had never heard of, there was a pocket dictionary, Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. The single hardcover volume was rather new looking, a book called The Harlem Globetrotters minus its dust jacket. It explained Altoona’s basketball pantomime. He must have been reading the book at the time of that strange performance.

  I lit a cigarette and wandered into the library nook. I glanced idly at the rows of books on the shelves and wondered how many of the St. Michael’s patrons other than Altoona had sampled them. One of them caught my eye. The Harlem Globetrotters was printed in bold red letters on the spine of the dust jacket. I slid it from the shelf, assuming it was a duplicate of the book in the shopping bag.

  This was a thin volume, and the jacket was too big for it. When I opened it I understood that the old saw about not judging a book by its cover could actually apply to books.

  “Sampling our library, eh, Mr. Coyne?”

  I closed the book hastily and turned.

  “Not many of our men are readers,” said the priest. “It’s too bad. Books are one thing that people are willing to donate.”

  I nodded. “Do you mind if I borrow this one?”

  “There’s no waiting list. Help yourself.”

  I put the book into the shopping bag that contained Altoona’s things. “There was something you wanted to talk about?”

  He touched my arm. “Come on.” He steered me out of the dayroom. I brought the shopping bag with me. “What happened to poor old Altoona points up a real problem our men have. Many of them, as you may imagine, are veterans, and should be receiving benefits. A lot of them are entitled to Social Security, or food stamps, or various other forms of welfare. Most of them don’t get it, for the simple reason that they don’t know how, or are unwilling, to negotiate the bureaucracies. They slip through the cracks. They are non-persons. I try to help. But I’m a priest.” He shrugged.

  “You’re not a lawyer,” I said.

  He grinned. “I’m not a lawyer. Sometimes I wish I were.” We had moved down the hallway, now empty of men, and he pushed on the door that led into the clinic. “Ah, here we are.”

  Dr. Vance stood when I entered and offered me that big snowshoe of a hand. “Ah, Mr. Coyne, indeed a pleasure to see you again, sir,” he said. His toothy grin gleamed in his dark face.

  “Mr. Coyne was a friend of Altoona, you remember,” said the priest. “He’s an attorney.”

  “A nice mahn, ol’ Altoona,” said the doctor. “On the rare occasions when he would come down here, before he got crazy, he’d only talk politics. ‘Adrian,’ he’d say, ‘what you think about the Caribbean? Next battleground, don’ you think?’ He was a sick ol’ man, refused medication. ‘I’m goin’ die,’ he’d say. ‘I’m goin’ die anyway. Nothin’ you can do about it.’”

  “It didn’t happen the way he expected,” I observed.

  Vance shrugged his great shoulders. “Better this way, maybe.”

  “Adrian donates his time to the clinic,” said Barrone, emphasizing the word “donates.”

  The big doctor grinned. “Since the President decided to spend his money on sending guns and boats into Haiti instead of on poor ol’ folks like Altoona, public health funds been drying up.” He shook his head. “I do what I can. Bring medicine samples from the hospital. Come over a few hours, three times a week. People should do what they can.”

  “I get the picture,” I said, smiling at the two of them. “You’ve ganged up on me. What is it you think I can do?”

  The priest said promptly, “They need an ombudsman. They need an advocate on Beacon Hill. They need legislation. They need somebody to cut through the red tape.” He stared at me.

  “You’re trying to shame me,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “I am.”

  “You’re very good at it, both of you.”

  They both smiled. “Give it some thought, Mr. Coyne,” said the priest.

  I nodded. “Okay. I will. Let me think about it. I’ll call you.”

  “If you don’t,” said Barrone, “I’ll call you. Count on it.”

  “What’ve I got this afternoon?” I said to Julie when I got back to the office.

  “Where’ve you been? You said you’d be gone for an hour. You’ve had a million calls.”

  “Sorry, Mother,” I said. “You can unfold your arms and stop tapping your foot. I went over to St. Michael’s and then I stopped by Marie’s for a big bowl of potato gnocchi, with her special meat sauce, Italian sausages, hot bread…”

  “You’re supposed to meet Mr. Boynton at his office at four-thirty. The Bruner estate?”

  “Oh, right.” I glanced at my Timex. It was a little after three. “Okay. Hold any calls, please. And have a cab come by for me about four-fifteen.”

  “My goodness, we’re suddenly businesslike. I suppose when one grows accustomed to four-hour lunch hours—”

  “I said I was sorry,” I said, and I went into my office.

  I put the shopping bag on top of my desk and removed the volume with The Harlem Globetrotters on the dust jacket. It was not a book about the basketball team. This dust jacket had been taken from the book it originally covered, and it was used to disguise this one.

  This one wasn’t a book at all.

  It was a diary. Stu Carver’s diary.

  Altoona hadn’t been as crazy as he had seemed. It occurred to me that he hadn’t been crazy at all. His miming Bob Cousy and his singing the Globetrotters’ theme song had been intended to convey a message to me. He had given me too much credit. I had accepted the opinions of Father Barrone and Dr. Vance and the superficial evidence of Altoona’s behavior. I had thought he was just crazy. It was nothing but good luck that I had happened to find the diary.

  I wondered why he had gone through the elaborate charade. Maybe it was simply paranoia.

  On the other hand, he had ended up getting killed.

  Fear, when it’s justified, isn’t paranoia at all.


  Who, then, did old Altoona fear so much that he felt compelled to disguise Stu’s diary, and hide it, like Poe’s purloined letter, in such an obvious place, and then direct me to it with his weird theatrics?

  Father Joe Barrone was the first name I came up with. The priest could have been Stu’s enemy, and Altoona’s, too, for that matter. But I didn’t see how Heather fit in. One thing was clear: Altoona hadn’t trusted Father Barrone. Otherwise he logically would have turned Stu’s diary over to him.

  Dr. Adrian Vance was the second name I came up with. I remembered how confidently the big doctor had wielded his surgical lancet. Might he handle an icepick with similar deftness? And if there were a drug connection, might his power to write prescriptions, and his access to hospital medicines, somehow explain Vance’s apparent commitment to the poor and downtrodden at St. Michael’s?

  What had Stu Carver written in that diary that provoked such fear in old Altoona, and that made the little volume so valuable that someone had been willing to kill three times for it?

  I would find out. I sat down to read it.

  SEVENTEEN

  “SHE WAS FUNNY ABOUT doing a will,” said Zerk. “She kept saying, ‘Do you think something’s going to happen to me?’ I assured her that it was simply a good policy for anybody with any kind of estate to have a will. She said she didn’t want to think about it. Anyway, we did one.”

  “And I’m the executor,” I said. “I was flattered that she asked me. We laughed about it. Some joke.”

  Zerk and I were driving out through the suburbs to Heather’s condo in Sudbury. A soft, misty rain was falling, and fog drifted up from the rapidly shrinking patches of snow in the shady corners and along the roadside. The countryside was March brown, all the mud and dead leaves and winter trash along the roadside newly unveiled where the snow had melted away. In the marshlands and along the swollen streams, pale patches of yellow and pink were beginning to show as the willows and swamp maples prepared to send forth their foliage.

  Up north, the natives would be wallowing in mud season. In Massachusetts, it mostly just looked dirty.

  “The place was sealed off,” Zerk was saying. “And, of course, I can’t arrange to sell it until we clear probate. We’ll have to look around, see what there is to dispose of. And you’ll have to figure out what to do with it all.”

  “As the executor.”

  “Right. As the executor of the estate.”

  “No heirs, huh?”

  “Both her parents are dead. No siblings. Her instructions were simply to donate everything to a charity. That means,” he said, turning to me, “a charity of your choice.”

  “I want to do something special with her photographs,” I said. “Perhaps arrange a showing, or try to get them printed in a book. They’re damn good.”

  We pulled into the parking area adjacent to Heather’s place. I hadn’t been back since the night she died.

  We walked up to the door. Zerk pulled a key from his pocket and stuck it into the lock.

  I lifted the loose shingle beside the door, and Heather’s spare key fell out. I picked it up and handed it to Zerk. “She was always forgetting her key,” I told him. “This is how I got in that night.”

  He pushed open the door, then turned to face me. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Fine.”

  The place was as I remembered it. The forensics experts had presumably bustled around with their little plastic bags, dusting, vacuuming, and otherwise searching for clues. As far as I had heard, they had found nothing. And with the suicide of David Lee, they had abandoned their quest.

  I wandered among the downstairs rooms. Somebody had had the foresight to clean out the refrigerator and throw out the potatoes that Heather had peeled and left in the sink. But the salad bowl was still sitting there, waiting for her to tear up the lettuce and slice the cucumbers and sweet onions.

  I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. “She exercised to classical music,” I said to Zerk, who was standing in the middle of the room with a notebook and pen in his hands. “The first time I came here, it was Wagner. She played it very loud. She looked terrific in a leotard.”

  Zerk sat down beside me. “This might not have been such a great idea, coming back here.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s all right. I wanted to. I’ve got to pick up those journals.”

  “Interesting stuff in that diary, huh?”

  “Very interesting,” I nodded. “If I can put the journals beside the diary, I think I might really have something.”

  “Wanna tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ve got to get a real estate appraiser out here, get a market value for the place,” said Zerk. “What do you think about the furniture?”

  “Sell it all. You don’t think there will be great-aunts and third cousins coming out of the woodwork to pick over the stuff, do you?”

  “As far as I know, you’re it, big fella,” said Zerk. “I’ve got to look around, make some notes.” He got up and headed for the stairs. “You coming?”

  “I really don’t want to go up there.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  After Zerk disappeared up the stairs toward Heather’s bedroom, I went over to her desk where, I knew, she had kept Stu’s journals. She had once showed me the stack of neat notes she was making as she worked her way through them. She had copied out quotes—descriptions of the men Stu had met, little anecdotes about their backgrounds, street scenes, possible captions for the photos she intended to take—and had written reminders for herself in the margins. She’d liked to lay out the papers on the top of the desk, which was otherwise bare except for a lamp and a ceramic beer mug of pens and pencils. She’d kept the journals and her notes in a big manila envelope in the bottom left-hand drawer.

  I pulled open the drawer. The envelope wasn’t there. Nor was it in any of the other drawers in the desk. I went back into the kitchen. Once in a while, I knew, she would spread all the papers out on the kitchen table to work on while something was roasting in the oven. I went through all the cabinets and drawers. Then I went back into the living room and conducted an orderly search through all the bookshelves. I looked under the sofa. I prowled among the coats and boots and the stack of games on the shelf in the hall closet.

  Then I went upstairs.

  Zerk was sitting on Heather’s bed, writing in his notebook. “You haven’t seen a big manila envelope, have you?” I said.

  “No. Haven’t really been looking, of course.”

  “Well, help me look.”

  He nodded, and together we went through the upstairs. I took the bathroom and the spare bedroom. Zerk rummaged through her underwear and sweaters in the bureau and moved the stuff around in her closet.

  Then we went back downstairs and did it all over again.

  Stu’s journals, and Heather’s notes, were not there.

  “Maybe she hid them someplace,” said Zerk. “Like she hid her spare key.”

  “She wasn’t hiding the key. She was just keeping it there. There’s a difference. She wasn’t the sort of person who hid things.” I shook my head. “I don’t understand it. You’re sure the police didn’t take them?”

  “The police took nothing,” he said. “I’m sure of that. Look. Maybe she had some other place for them. An office, safe deposit box?”

  “No. She had no reason to secure them. She was working on them. This is where she worked. The stuff should be right here, in the drawer.”

  Zerk peered at me. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  I nodded. “They’ve been stolen. Yes.”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s a damn shame. That’ll make it pretty tough to make sense out of that diary, huh?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said slowly, “now that I think about it, it actually makes things clearer.” I nodded. “Much clearer.”

  I got an answering machine at Gus Becker’s number. An efficient female voice repeated th
e number I had dialed and instructed me to wait for the tone and then leave my own name and number and state my business, and Mr. Becker would get back to me as soon as he could.

  “This is Brady Coyne, Gus,” I said to the machine. “I’ve got something that I think will interest you.” I said I’d be home for the rest of the evening and left my number. Then I sat back and lit a Winston.

  Becker called back before I finished the cigarette. “Sorry about the machine,” he said. “I’ve gotta do it that way, now.”

  “Heavy cloak and dagger stuff, huh?”

  I heard him chuckle. “I know, I know. You’re familiar with that ploy. I keep forgetting. So what’s up?”

  “I found Stu Carver’s diary. You still interested?”

  He hesitated. “Well, yeah, I guess I am. I had more or less abandoned that line, but, sure, I’d like to see it. Want me to come by and pick it up, or what?”

  “Whatever you want,” I said. “I could meet you someplace.”

  “Yeah, okay. That might be easier. Tonight?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Tonight’s fine. You name it.”

  He paused for a moment. “Well, how about Choo Li’s? That would be convenient for me. Know where Choo Li’s is?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Beach Street. You can’t miss it. Pretty good food. Never crowded. Drinks are generous. I’ll treat you.”

  “That’s in Chinatown, right?”

  “Right. Can you find it?”

  “Choo Li’s on Beach Street. I’ll find it.”

  “In an hour?”

  I glanced at my watch. It was a little after eight. “Better make it around ten-thirty. I’ve got a few things to do first.”

  “Ten-thirty, then. Hey, Brady?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you had a chance to look over the diary?”

  “Aw, shit, Gus. It’s all scribbles. I’m not really interested, anyway. I’m just trying to help you out.”

  “Sure. Appreciate it. Probably means nothing anyway. Know something, though?”