Muscle Memory Read online

  Muscle Memory

  A Brady Coyne Mystery

  William G. Tapply

  To my students—past, present, and future—who always challenge and inspire me, and who help me to remember that there are more important things a person can do than make up stories.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Preview: One-Way Ticket

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  A TYPICAL FEBRUARY TUESDAY evening in Boston—hard, wind-driven snow in the air, slushy sidewalks underfoot. But it was cozy and dry at Skeeter’s Infield, my favorite hangout down the alley in the financial district, halfway between my office in Copley Square and my empty apartment on Lewis Wharf on the Harbor.

  Since Alex and I split back in September, I’d found myself stopping off at Skeeter’s on my way home from work more regularly than was probably healthy.

  I’d had one of Skeeter’s famous burgers and a stack of onion rings, and now I was lingering over a Sam Adams draft watching a college basketball game on the big television over the bar. Mick Fallon had taken the stool next to me. Mick was a hulking middle-aged guy, a giant of a man who’d once played power forward for the Detroit Pistons, one of the many ex-athletes I’d run into a few times at Skeeter’s. On the other side of me, two pretty thirty-something loan officers in business suits and short skirts—Molly and Joanne were their names—were sipping white wine and yelling at the television. Molly was the lanky brunette, and Joanne was the stocky blonde.

  Mick was leaning across in front of me explaining the pick-and-roll to the women, and I didn’t notice when the two men in silk suits came in and took the stools down at the other end of the bar until Mick jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow, jerked his head in their direction, and whispered, “Watch out for those two.”

  Skeeter was standing behind the bar with his arms folded across his chest. Skeeter O’Reilly had been a reserve infielder for the Red Sox back in the early seventies. He was a tough little monkey who’d known how to take an inside pitch on the ass and steal a base, and he’d hung around baseball until he blew out his knee trying to break up a double play in the late innings of a meaningless September game that the Sox were losing by seven runs.

  One of the guys in the silk suits was bending over the bar toward Skeeter. “Don’t gimme this crap,” he was saying. “Me and Paulie want a fuckin’ beer.” He looked to be in his late twenties. He had black hair and black eyes, black five o’clock shadow and a big black mustache, with a salmon-colored necktie and a matching show handkerchief in his breast pocket. His thick, corded neck and bulky shoulders suggested a narcissistic devotion to Nautilus machines. His companion—Paulie—could have been his twin, except he was clean-shaven and his necktie and handkerchief were turquoise.

  Skeeter was shaking his head. “You better watch your language, Patsy,” he said evenly. “Anyways, you ain’t welcome here, and that’s how it is and you know it. I don’t want no trouble, and neither do you. So just get out, okay?”

  “What?” said Patsy, jerking his thumb in our direction. “You only serve hookers and washed-up old jocks? We ain’t good enough for this dump?”

  Skeeter shrugged. “You better leave, both of you, before I call the cops.”

  Patsy glared at Skeeter for a minute. Skeeter stared right back at him. After a minute of that, Patsy glanced in our direction and grinned, as if he wanted to be sure that we were watching. Then he turned to Skeeter, nodded, and settled back on his barstool. “No need for cops,” he said. “No hard feelings, huh?” He hooked his finger at Skeeter. “Come here,” he said. “I wanna tell you something.”

  Skeeter shrugged. He unfolded his arms, wiped his hands on his rag, and leaned across the bar toward them.

  Patsy smiled and patted Skeeter’s cheek. Then suddenly his other hand shot out, clamped onto the front of Skeeter’s shirt, and yanked the little guy off his feet so that he was half-sprawled on the bartop. Patsy shoved his face into Skeeter’s. “Okay, you little fuck,” he hissed. “Now you listen to me—”

  Beside me I heard Mick growl “Sonofabitch,” and the next thing I knew he was looming directly behind Patsy and Paulie. He grabbed each of them by the scruff of the neck, hauled them backwards off their barstools, and dragged them toward the door.

  “Hey, Brady,” said Mick. His voice was calm, but fury blazed in his eyes. “Gimme a hand here. Help me take out the trash.”

  I got up, went to the door, and opened it. Patsy and Paulie were both full-grown men, but Mick stood about six-seven and weighed close to two-eighty, and in his grasp they looked like a pair of plucked chickens being taken to slaughter by a big red-faced butcher. His huge paws nearly encircled their necks. They were gasping and flapping their arms in the helpless, doomed way a freshly caught trout flops his tail in the bottom of a canoe.

  Mick flung them outside one at a time. First went Patsy, who landed on his feet, staggered across the narrow alley, and smashed against the brick wall. Paulie followed, skidding on his knees and then sprawling facedown on the hard, dirty old snowbank.

  Patsy stood there rubbing his neck, sucking in deep breaths, and trying to look fierce. “You don’t know who you’re fuckin’ with,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Mick. “Actually I do. A couple pieces a shit, that’s what.”

  “Man,” said Patsy, “you are dead fuckin’ meat, pal.”

  Paulie slowly stood up, brushed off his pants, and turned to Mick. “You know who our boss is?”

  “Sure,” said Mick. “I’m not impressed.”

  “Big mistake, pal,” said Paulie. “You’ll be hearin’ from our lawyer.”

  Mick grinned. “You know where to find me.” He stepped inside, took two camel-hair topcoats off the coatrack, pretended to sniff them, then threw them out into the alley. “These must be yours,” he said. “Same stink.”

  He slammed the door shut and returned to his barstool. I followed him.

  Skeeter came over rubbing the back of his neck. “You shouldn’ta done that, Mick. You know who those guys are?”

  Mick nodded. “Sure I know. Fuck ’em.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Molly, the brunette loan officer. “Who are they?

  “Couple of Vinnie Russo’s boys,” said Mick.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You mean the Vinnie Russo? That godfather guy from the North End?”

  “Yeah,” said Mick. “Uncle Vinnie lives practically around the corner from here.”

  “God,” she said. “He assassinates people.”

  “Not him personally,” said Mick. “He has guys like Patsy and Paulie do it for him.”

  Molly turned to me. “I heard what that man said. You’re a lawyer. Can those—those hoodlums really sue him?”

  “Anybody can sue anybody,” I said. “It’s the American way.”

  “They’d be more likely to shoot him,” said Skeeter.

  Mick grinned. “I think Paulie’s nice suit got ripped, and Patsy did bump his head against the wall. Wouldn’t put it past ’em to strap on neck braces and take me to court.” He looked at me with his eyebrows arched. “I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “I couldn’t represent you on this one,” I said. “I’m a witness.”

  “So?”

  I shrugged. “So it would be unethical.”

  Mick grinned. “Holy shit,” he said.
“A lawyer with ethics. You got a card?”

  “Sure. But if you’re worried about those two goons…”

  Mick waved his hand. “You never know when you might need a lawyer with ethics, that’s all.”

  I fished a business card from my wallet and handed it to him.

  Molly clutched my arm and looked up at me. She had green eyes, I noticed. They crinkled when she smiled, as if she’d spent a lot of time outdoors. “Can I have one?” she said.

  “You need a lawyer with ethics, too?”

  She arched her eyebrows. “I might.”

  I gave her one of my cards. She looked at it, tucked it into her purse, then smiled up at me with her eyebrows arched…

  And it wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized she’d expected me to ask for her business card.

  I hadn’t played those games for a long time.

  I had showered and brushed my teeth, and when I opened the bathroom door I heard a woman’s voice in my bedroom. My first—irrational—thought was that Alex had changed her mind, driven down from Maine, and snuck in while I was in the shower, that she’d decided she couldn’t stand living without me after all, and it took me a minute to realize the voice was coming from the answering machine on the night table beside my bed.

  “…asleep? Well, I didn’t mean to wake you up. I was just thinking how I really need a lawyer.” It was Molly, the pretty loan officer from Skeeter’s. “Hey, Brady,” she said, “pick up the phone. I’ve got a really good idea I want to run past you.” She paused. “Come on. You’re listening, aren’t you?”

  I sat on the bed, reached for the phone, hesitated, then pulled my hand back.

  “Oh, well,” she said after a moment. “At least maybe you’ll call me sometime, huh?” She recited a phone number. “I was just thinking,” she went on, “you might like a home-cooked meal. Believe it or not, I’m a pretty good cook. I heard you and Mick talking—I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help it—and I know you’re divorced. Well, ta-da, me, too.” She laughed quickly. “God, I feel like a jerk. I shouldn’t have called. Stupid me. Oh, well. Too late now. So you’ve got my number. I’d love to hear from you. I really would. Every ethical lawyer needs a new client now and then, right?” She paused. “Wow. This is embarrassing. Call me? Please?”

  She laughed again before she disconnected.

  I liked Molly’s laugh. It was low and throaty and intimate. I remembered the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled.

  I watched the message light blink for a minute. Then I reached over and hit the erase button.

  One

  I HAD SWIVELED MY office chair around so I could gaze out at a sun-drenched April morning. My window onto Copley Square looks east across the plaza to the dark-stoned, dour old Trinity Church, which crouches in the shadow of the sleek, glass-sided John Hancock Tower rising behind it. The old and the new Boston in counterpoint.

  The view from my office window takes in a lot of concrete and steel and glass and enterprise. It barely qualifies as “outdoors,” but on a pretty spring morning it’s good enough to get me daydreaming about casting dry flies to rising trout, which is what I was doing when Julie buzzed me.

  I rotated back to my desk and picked up the phone. “Yes, boss?” I said.

  “There’s a Michael Fallon on line two.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “He says he needs a lawyer. You’re the lawyer around here. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Good plan.” I hit the blinking light on my telephone console and said, “Mick? How’re you doing?”

  “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all. Actually, I am one miserable old jockstrap, Brady. I gotta talk to you, man.”

  “What’s up?”

  I heard him sigh. “It’s Kaye. My wife. She’s… well, she says she wants a divorce, and she tells me I better get myself a good lawyer, because she’s got one, and…” He fell silent.

  “Mick?” I said after a minute.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “I’ll be happy to represent you,” I said.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want a fucking divorce. I don’t want a lawyer. I just want my wife.”

  I glanced at my appointment calendar. “How about lunch? Say twelve-thirty?”

  “You gotta help me fight it, man.”

  “Meet me at Skeeter’s,” I said. “We’ll grab a booth and talk about it.”

  I left a little after noon for the familiar twenty-minute walk to Skeeter’s. Newbury Street was swarming with lunchtime shoppers, and I was pleased to observe that the female secretaries and lawyers and college students had broken out their springtime outfits—short skirts, pastel blouses, flowered dresses. On the Common, the ancient beeches and stubborn old elms were leafing out, the pigeons were flocking, and even the bums on the benches who were feeding them seemed high-spirited. Ah, spring.

  No matter how many times I saw Mick, I was always surprised at how big he was. The booth at Skeeter’s seemed kindergarten-sized with Mick wedged into it. When he played for the Pistons back in the seventies, they’d listed him as six-nine, two-thirty in the program. Actually he was closer to six-seven, but the weight had been about right. He’d put on thirty or forty pounds since then.

  I slid in across from him. He was hunched over with his forearms on the table. His catcher’s-mitt hands dwarfed the mug of draft beer they were cradling. The beer was untouched.

  He looked up. “Thanks for coming.”

  I held out my hand to him. “It’s good to see you again, Mick.”

  He took my hand in his huge paw. “I know plenty of lawyers,” he said, “but this…”

  I nodded. I refuse to accept clients I don’t like, but I liked Mick, considered him a friend. I haven’t found that friendship gets in the way of serving my clients. “Tell me about it,” I said.

  At that point Skeeter sidled up to our booth. Skeeter, as usual, was wearing his old Red Sox cap. He was a little self-conscious about his bald head. He looked from Mick to me, nodded as if he could read Mick’s mood, and instead of his usual friendly greeting, he simply said, “Lunch, fellas?”

  “Just bring me some coffee, Skeets,” I said. “We’ll eat in a little while.”

  Skeeter nodded, glanced at Mick’s full beer mug, and left.

  I turned back to Mick. “So…?”

  “It’s hard, man. It hurts bad.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Sure. We just—”

  “We’ve got to bring her to her senses, Brady. I don’t want a divorce. She can’t really do this to me, can she?”

  “I’m afraid she can, Mick. Here in Massachusetts, at least, if one party wants a divorce, and if it gets that far, the court makes the assumption that the marriage isn’t working. The court aims to dissolve bad marriages fairly, not repair them. That’s how the system works.”

  Mick stared at me for a minute, then dropped his chin onto his chest. “So what’m I gonna do?” he mumbled.

  “I guess it depends,” I said. “Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

  He nodded. “We, um, separated a year ago January. Right after the holidays.” He shook his head. “Some holidays.”

  “So you’ve been separated for—what, almost a year and a half now?

  “Not separated,” he said. “Not legally. Just… not living together.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “You always led me to believe you were happily married.”

  He flapped his hands. “It was easier to pretend, that’s all.”

  I nodded. “Sure. Okay. It doesn’t matter. Continue.”

  He talked down into the circle his big arms made on the table, staring into his untouched mug of beer. “It was Kaye’s idea. I mean, I had no idea she…” He looked up at me. “She just said she needed some space for a while. Erin and Danny were both off to college, and it was just me and Kaye. I’d been kinda looking forward to it, you know? I mean, we have
—had—a great family. We always had a good time. All four of us. So when she told me she wanted us to split, I didn’t know what to think, Brady. I asked her if it was something I’d done, and she said no, that it was just her and she felt like she needed for us to be apart for a while. She needed space.” Mick shook his head. “What the fuck is this space shit, anyway? I—”

  He glanced up. Skeeter was standing beside me holding a mug of coffee.

  “Thanks, Skeets,” I said as he put it in front of me.

  Mick watched Skeeter leave, then turned to me. “I didn’t like it, Brady. It wasn’t what I wanted. Hell, I just wanted my family. But what was I gonna do? She said she’d move out if I wanted, but I said no, I’d find someplace.” He shook his head. “I figured it’d be a few weeks, she’d miss me, and I’d move back in and everything would be okay. So I found a shitty little furnished apartment near Union Square in Somerville, took my toothbrush and some clothes over there, and waited for her to figure it out.”

  “I didn’t know any of this, Mick.”

  “I didn’t want anybody to know. Like I said. It was easier to pretend. I guess the only person I was fooling was me.” He lifted his mug, took a sip, put it down, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “You’ve never met Kaye.”

  “No,” I said. “But I feel like I know her.”

  Mick smiled. “I’m always bragging on her, I know.” He shook his head. “Anyway, after I moved out, we’d sometimes meet for lunch or supper, and it’d be like nothing was wrong. She’d chatter on about the kids or her bridge games or something in the neighborhood, telling her dumb jokes—flirting with me, for Christ sake—and I’m sitting there thinking, This is nuts. This is my wife, the woman I love, and we’re not living together, and she’s telling me about how Alma Crynock’s fucking dog had puppies?” He waved his hand in the air. “The thing about Kaye, see, if she doesn’t want to talk about something, there’s no way you can make her talk about it. She hates to argue, and if there’s something you don’t agree on, she just keeps talking about something else until you give up. I’ve been married to her for twenty-two years, and I’ve learned to wait her out. Eventually she’ll bring it up, whatever it is, and that means she’s ready to talk about it. So I kept waiting for her to be ready to talk about the only thing that was on my mind, which was when I could go back home.” He shrugged. “She never did. Then she called me last night.”