Marine Corpse Read online

  “Stu was assassinated, then?”

  Becker shrugged. “Call it what you will. The police are off base, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, there is one other thing,” I said.

  Becker showed no eagerness. He just gazed at me.

  “Stu was gay.”

  Becker nodded. He didn’t seem particularly surprised. “That might fit,” he said after a moment. “It might mean something. Was he a flirt, do you know?”

  “You mean did he pick up guys?”

  He nodded impatiently. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he had a lover.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “I suppose I could try.”

  “Did Carver do drugs, Mr. Coyne? That you know of, I mean.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shrugged, then patted the stack of papers on his lap. “I hope you won’t be needing these right away.”

  “Just so that I get them back eventually,” I said.

  “Sure. No problem.” He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket, tore out a page, and scribbled onto it. Then he handed it to me. “Here’s a couple of phone numbers where I can be reached. If you hear anything, or think of anything, please call me.”

  I took the paper from him. Then he stood up and moved toward the door. I followed him. He put his hand on the knob, then turned to face me.

  “Sorry about jerking you around yesterday, Mr. Coyne. Reflex, I guess.”

  I shrugged. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  He laughed and clapped me on my shoulder. He opened the door. “Don’t forget,” he said. “If anything comes up, give me a buzz.”

  Later that afternoon I punched my fist into my palm and muttered, “God damn it,” and called Ben Woodhouse at home.

  “How’d it go with Becker?” he said.

  “Fine. I cooperated.”

  “Good. That’s good, Brady. Now, I expect you called to tell me how we’re going to handle that business with Stu’s condominium.”

  “There’s only one way to handle it,” I said. “Drop it.”

  I heard Ben clear his throat. Ben cleared his throat when he was angry. “I want this case handled, not dropped, Brady.”

  “I am not going to handle it, Ben.”

  “Well, now, I thought we discussed that. Meriam is quite adamant, you know. She wants the girl out of there.”

  “And I gave her my best advice.”

  “Well, yes, I know you did. However, that’s not the way we’re going to go with this one, Brady. The family has decided.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “If you’d like, I’ll recommend an attorney for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Count me out, Ben.”

  He was silent for a moment. “What exactly are you saying, Brady?”

  “I quit.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you quit?”

  “I mean what I said. I quit. Get yourself and Meriam another attorney.”

  “Hell, man…”

  I hung up before I could hear the rest of it.

  NINE

  “YOU KNOW,” SAID HEATHER, reaching across the small table to touch my hand, “we haven’t talked about Stu all evening. That’s been kinda nice.”

  I smiled and nodded. My knee was bouncing in rhythm to the good jazz of the group that called itself “IUD”—a private joke of theirs, I assumed. They had a bass and a piano and a sax and percussion, and their sound was good New Orleans blues, with hints of Ellington and Garner and Getz melded in, and I liked it. The place was dark and intimate and not very crowded. Heather and I had a table close enough to the four black musicians so that we could smile and nod our approval to them and they could bow toward us in reply. The drinks were cheap and generous.

  I feared the place would go out of business soon, the same way that the Jazz Workshop and Paul’s Mall in Copley Square had a decade or so ago. Unamplified music in Boston was not big business these days, and this little spot on the edge of the sticks on Route 9 didn’t have much of a chance.

  Earlier, Heather and I had had big slabs of prime rib at Finnerty’s. We had agreed not to bore each other with our life stories. Our decision to avoid talking about Stu Carver had been tacit.

  “Actually,” I said to her, “you are quite a beautiful woman.”

  “I love that ‘actually,’” she said. “Clearly you are attempting to refute an obvious piece of conventional wisdom. Very obvious, what with this big turnip for nose and this mouthful of crooked teeth.” But she smiled, and it all fit together, as I thought she realized. She had the kind of look that sneaks up on you—not striking or dramatic, like lanky blondes with Farrah Fawcett hair. But her warm good nature shone through. “Ah, I’m just this dumpy Jewish kid,” she added, and crossed her eyes at me.

  “I’ll bet you’d like me to elaborate,” I said.

  “No. I know when to leave well enough alone.”

  “Like the music?”

  “Very much. It’s been a nice evening. Good food, good music. Company hasn’t been all that bad, either.”

  I squeezed her hand and then let it go. I picked up my drink. “There are some things we need to talk about,” I said.

  She nodded. “Here it comes.”

  “First, just for your information, I no longer call the Woodhouse clan my clients.”

  “Because of me, huh?”

  “Not really. Because they do not accept the legal counsel they pay me for. It happened to come to a head over your condominium.”

  “Brady, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I feel rather good about it, actually. Anyway, I won’t go hungry. The point is, they seem fixed on pursuing the case in court. I’m certain they’ll get nowhere with it. Still, make sure you talk it over with Zerk.”

  She nodded. “What else? Was there something else?”

  I lit a cigarette. “I met this guy the other day. Friend of Ben Woodhouse who’s some kind of federal agent. He’s with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and he’s interested in Stu’s death.”

  “Interested,” she said. “Interested how? I don’t get it.”

  “Did Stu do drugs?”

  She scowled. “I still don’t get it.”

  I explained Gus Becker’s hypothesis to her—that Stu might have been murdered because he had become involved in, or had learned something about, the cocaine war in Boston. I took it slow and careful with her, watching her face for a reaction. Throughout my recitation Heather’s eyes never left mine, and the frown never left her face.

  When I had finished, she said, “Oh, wow! That is wild.”

  I nodded. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Did Stu do drugs? That’s some question. Really. I mean, everybody does drugs. But everybody doesn’t get an icepick stuck into their head. Jesus! Yeah, sure, Stu would do a couple lines of coke once in a while. That’s no big deal. We’d do a little grass occasionally. But nothing heavy, Brady. Listen. I know about big drug use. I’ve seen it. I know about cocaine, what it can do, how people can get ruined by it. It was nothing like that with Stu. He cared about his body. He took care of it. He ate well and exercised. If anything, I suppose he drank too much. But he wasn’t crazy. You tell me about drug wars and South American dealers and people killing each other and all I can say is that I knew Stuart Carver and he would never never get involved in something like that.”

  “But if he used coke, even just occasionally, he had to buy it somewhere,” I persisted.

  “He had a friend. Definitely not a dealer or anything.”

  “Was this friend by any chance also his lover?”

  Heather made her eyes go wide. “My, aren’t we the shrewd attorney, now.”

  “Okay,” I went on, “and if this friend had drug connections, then Stu might have known about them. Q.E.D.”

  “Oh, Q.E-bullshit,” she snorted. “You’re on the wrong t
rack. You’re way off, believe me. Hey, maybe he found out about something, I don’t know about that. Although there’s nothing in the notebooks to suggest it, as far as I can tell. But I am absolutely positive that Stu was not involved in anything. That is really far out.”

  “Tell me about his friend.”

  She let her shoulders sag. Then she reached again for my hand. “I can’t, Brady. I can’t violate their trust. Either of them. I am the only person on earth who knew about them.”

  “Maybe not.”

  She cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it.”

  She shifted her eyes to watch the musicians. They were doing something slow and syncopated that might have had its roots in Bach, the pianist and the guy on the sax taking cues from each other. It was compelling, and I assumed Heather was absorbed in it.

  When it was over she clapped politely and turned to me. “He teaches math. He’s a very nice guy. He and Stu were friends since Harvard. He’s a gay math teacher and nobody knows it and he doesn’t want anybody to know it. He’s quite poor and quite dedicated to his students. He coaches soccer, heads up the computer program, and he emphatically does not fool around with the boys, and I don’t want to say anything else about him.”

  “Yeah, I understand that,” I said. “But he might be in danger, you know.”

  “You think…?”

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I can’t help feeling that if what happened to Stu was related to drugs—or his being gay, for that matter—then this guy ought to be warned.”

  “I never thought of that,” she said. She frowned and then leaned across the table toward me. “Hey, Brady?” she said in a low voice.

  “Yes.”

  “C’mere,” she whispered.

  I leaned toward her. She touched my face. “Please kiss me.”

  I complied, intending a brief touching of lips. But she held it, her hand against my jaw, with an urgency that I didn’t reciprocate.

  She pulled her face back and looked into my eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess you’re not into PDA’s, huh?”

  “What’s a PDA?”

  “Public display of affection, dummy.” She sat back. “I still need a hug.”

  “Soon,” I said. “After they finish this set. Then, in private.”

  “A deal,” she replied. After a moment, she said, “Okay. His name is David Lee. He teaches at Lincoln Prep, which is, surprise, in Lincoln, just outside what passes for the center of town there, not far from the Audubon place. If you feel you have to talk to him, please be sure to tell him that it was me who told you about him, because otherwise he’d be paranoid as hell about it. If you can make it so that he understands why I told you, without scaring the wee-wee out of him, I’d really appreciate it.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  “I feel rotten for telling you.”

  “I hope you feel you can trust me,” I said. “By the way, I did try to do you a favor the other day.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “I went to see Altoona.”

  “Who? Oh, yeah. The guy in Stu’s notebooks. What’d he have to say? Did he know anything about the diary?”

  “He didn’t have anything to say. He’s had some kind of schizophrenic episode, and I couldn’t get through to him. Very sad. When I saw him before—as I did weekly for a couple of months—he was very sharp and smart and good company. Now he’s off in his own world somewhere. If Stu kept a diary, or if there were other notebooks, I couldn’t learn it from Altoona. But I did try for you.”

  “Appreciate it. Too bad about the old guy. From what Stu wrote, he was really close to him.”

  “What else did you find in the notebooks?”

  “Oh, you know Stu. Trying to be a sociologist. He was really fascinated with the types of people he met, those poor street people. He seemed quite taken with the fact that so many of them were young. A lot of women, too. And he really got into the way they grouped themselves. Almost exclusively by their ethnic identity. Puerto Ricans and blacks and Arabs. The stereotyped old winos—maybe like your Altoona man—they stuck to themselves, too. From what Stu wrote in the notebooks, there were little clusters of Greeks and Poles and Lithuanians, and just about anything else you can imagine, and they all liked to talk their own language and keep to themselves. It’d be fun to try to photograph them, to capture their differences, their poor old pride, to see if you couldn’t get a feel for the sadness and hopelessness of it.” She shook her head. “It would beat the hell out of doing portraits of snotty suburban toddlers and high school graduates, I can tell you that.”

  The sax player announced that the group was going to take a short break. I lifted my eyebrows at Heather. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  It was about a twenty-minute ride back to her condominium. Heather rested her hand lightly against the back of my neck as we drove, and we didn’t talk much. Neither of us had said anything about it, but we both knew that we were heading back to go to bed together, and I sensed a kind of distance between us, a mutual shyness, and an apprehension, too.

  When we got inside, she bustled about, turning on lights, moving pillows around on the sofa, lining up the edges on a stack of magazines. “Oh, the place is a mess,” she muttered. “Do you want to put on some music? Help yourself. Listen. Just make yourself comfortable, okay? I just want to—”

  “Heather,” I said.

  She turned to look at me. “What?”

  I held out a hand. “Come here.”

  She smiled. “What for?”

  “That hug.”

  She regarded me solemnly. “Yes. All right, then.”

  She came to me slowly and put her arms around my waist. I held her carefully, standing there in the middle of her livingroom, my face in her hair, breathing in her good clean smell. After a moment she shuddered and adjusted herself against me. “Thanks,” she mumbled into my chest. “I needed that.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She stepped away from me. “At the risk of committing a cliché, I think I’d like to slip into something more comfortable. Want to find something to drink?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She was back downstairs in a few minutes, barefoot and wearing jeans and a man’s shirt with its tails flapping. “Oh, that’s better,” she sighed. “I still can’t get used to pantyhose.”

  I had found two bottles of beer in her refrigerator. I handed her one. “I haven’t seen any of your work,” I said. “Don’t you do anything except department store portraits? Most photographers hang their stuff on their walls.”

  “My photographs are kind of like music to me,” she said. “I’m not always in the mood for them. When I am, I take them out. Wanna see?”

  “Very much.”

  She went over to her desk and came back with a stack of matted, unframed eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photos. “These are my favorites,” she said, handing them to me.

  We sat side by side on the sofa. She lay her head against my shoulder as I flipped through the dozen photographs. Each was a study in contrast of line, shape, and texture—something soft, irregular, rounded, and natural juxtaposed with something sharp, angular, and manmade. There was an oak leaf caught on a sewer grate, a cloud formation shot into the sun through the struts of a suspension bridge, tall weeds with tiny round blossoms growing up through a rusting hunk of farm machinery. Each photo, at first glance, struck me as simply a snapshot. But each one compelled me to look twice, and when I did I discovered the composition and point of view that gave it a kind of completeness and unity. The pieces fit together.

  “I showed these once,” she said. “I called the set ‘The Machine in the Garden.’ Not very original. A man offered me five hundred dollars for the set. I turned him down.”

  “What were you asking?”

  “Oh, I got what I wanted. I wanted someone to offer to buy them. I wanted someone to say that they were worth money, that these
creations out of my own mind’s eye were actually of value. Five hundred dollars was probably a very generous price for a dozen photographs by a complete unknown. But right then, it was absolutely fulfilling to get the offer. It made me love these pictures too much to sell them. Do you understand?”

  She looked up at me and I kissed her forehead. “I think so,” I said. “I like your pictures very much. There’s a tension in them, a war going on there between the forces of nature and progress, or civilization, or mankind. You can’t tell who’s winning, but they’re kind of ominous. That’s what you mean, I guess, by machines and gardens, huh?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  She snuggled against me while I riffled through the stack of pictures again. I put the one of the bridge and clouds on top and studied it. “Like that one?” Heather said.

  “Especially, yes. It’s my favorite.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want to break up the set. Hey, if you wouldn’t even sell it…”

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “I’d love to have it.”

  “Take it, then. Please.”

  “I accept.” She looked up at me and smiled, and I kissed her on the mouth. She moved against me for an instant, and then she touched my face with her fingertips and drew back.

  “Hey, Brady,” she murmured.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know how to play gin?”

  I smiled. “I think I can remember the rudiments.”

  She sat sideways on the sofa and folded her arms. “Penny a point. What do you say?”

  “You’re on.”

  She went looking for cards and sent me to the kitchen for more beer. When I returned to the livingroom she was seated crosslegged on the floor. She had put a Chuck Berry tape on, and we hummed and sang when we knew the words, and when we didn’t we made them up. Heather dealt the cards deftly, making them click as she flicked them out. She played fiercely, frowning a lot and chewing on her tongue and offering a running commentary on the progress of the game.

  When we were done, she announced that I owed her four dollars and seventy-one cents. “Pay up,” she said.