Marine Corpse Page 11

“Sure,” I said. “I will.”

  “Now.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  I counted out the bills and change for her. “Where’d you learn to play like that?” I said.

  “My Daddy taught me. He was a real mavin on cards, Daddy was.” She grinned at me. “He tried to teach me a lot of other stuff, too, but except for the cards, my Daddy wasn’t so smart, so I don’t pay that much attention to the other stuff.”

  “What sort of other stuff?” I said.

  “Aw,” she said, waving her hand vaguely around, “just his ideas about what was fun and what wasn’t. Know what I mean?”

  “Nope. Haven’t the foggiest.”

  She put her hands on her hips and sighed. “Well, come on, then. I suppose I’ll just have to show you.”

  She took my hand and led me toward the stairs. She paid absolutely no attention to my cries of protest.

  TEN

  “SO THIS IS GETTING serious, huh?” remarked Julie a couple of days later.

  She was seated beside me at my desk waiting for me to sign a stack of letters and documents she had typed up. She cupped her chin in her hand, her elbow propped up on the corner of the desk, and she was staring at me as if she could read secrets from my face.

  “I like your hair that way,” I said, as I scanned one of the letters and then scrawled my name at the bottom.

  “It’s the same way it’s been for months, and don’t try to change the subject.”

  “It looks different. Sort of windblown.”

  “All the blather around here, it’s no wonder. The Kriegel dame, is it?”

  “No one says ‘dame’ anymore, Julie. You’ve been reading too much Mickey Spillane.”

  “You’ve got a real thing for photographers.”

  “You noticed my new picture, eh?”

  “Yes. It’s swell. I suppose that’s why you’ve given it a position of such prominence. On the wall right across from my desk.”

  I shrugged elaborately. “It was a place that needed something.”

  “One of the shots Gloria did of your boys would have looked just fine there. This one is so depressing.”

  “It is powerful, isn’t it?”

  “I said depressing, not powerful. Look, Brady. If you’re so hung up on women who can take pictures, why don’t you just go back to Gloria?”

  I put down my pen. “Because she won’t have me, for one reason. Now why don’t you lay off my private life, huh?”

  “You know why.”

  “Hey. I’ve been hurt before, I’ll be hurt again. That’s part of the fun of it. I like this girl.”

  “Next thing, you’ll be saying you’re in love with her.”

  “I would never say that.”

  “Already I can see it. You’ve become a quivering mass of chocolate pudding. No. Vanilla. Vanilla pudding has less character than chocolate.”

  “Yeah, I know, and my practice is suffering and you’re doing all my work for me. We’ve talked about that before.”

  She didn’t smile. “We talk about that all the time. Look. I’m not complaining.” She knitted her brows and turned down the corners of her mouth.

  “You could have fooled me.” I patted her hand in what I hoped was an avuncular manner. “You’re beautiful when you pout,” I said, which produced the desired effect. She stuck her tongue out at me. “I’m headed out to Lincoln this afternoon,” I said. “Don’t wait for me.”

  “Gonna stop off in Sudbury afterwards?”

  “No, smartass, I’m not. I’m going to come back and catch up on my paperwork in peace, without people distracting me with dire predictions and suffocating concern. Besides,” I smiled, “Heather is tied up all evening.”

  Julie gathered the stack of letters together, tapping the edges even before she picked them up. Then she stood and frowned down at me. “It’s just that you’re such a baby. You’re so easily hurt.”

  “Oh,” I said with a wave of my hand, “I guess I can take care of myself.”

  “That,” she said, pivoting toward the door, “is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Lincoln Prep was a cluster of old brick buildings tucked against a piney hillside on one of the winding country roads in Lincoln, near the DeCordova Museum. Across the street endless acres of meadow and woodland rolled downhill toward a low horizon. The Lincoln town mothers and fathers, with excellent foresight and apparently limitless funds, had purchased and preserved all of this beautiful New England countryside as conservation land. It has always seemed to me that most of Lincoln consisted of conservation land. They conserved meadows and marshes, bogs and fens, hills and dales, to the delight of cross-country skiers, cyclists, hikers, picnickers, and wildflower pickers—out-of-towners, most of them, whose presence, I suspected, was barely tolerated by the residents of Lincoln, who, if the truth were known, wanted it all to themselves. It wasn’t the ecology they wanted to conserve, so much as it was the buffer between themselves and the hoi polloi surrounding them.

  As I strolled from the parking lot toward the nearest school building, I half expected to see deer grazing on the brown grass that stuck up here and there through the crusty snow that sheeted the meadow. I saw no deer, but as I watched, a wedge of geese cruised over on its way to the open water at the Great Meadow in Concord.

  A blond boy in a designer jogging suit directed me to David Lee’s room. Classes had evidently ended for the day, because the campus was virtually deserted. Inside the classroom building, the corridors echoed my footsteps. Down the hall I heard voices. I stopped outside the open doorway and peered in. Seated side by side at two student desks were a dark-haired boy with a bad case of acne and a dumpy middle-aged man wearing thick glasses and thinning gray-blond hair.

  I stood there uncertainly for a moment, and then the man looked up. “Help you, sir?” he said.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Lee.”

  “I am he. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to talk with you.”

  He nodded, as if that was what he assumed. “On what subject?”

  “Private,” I said. “I can wait.”

  He frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. We’ll only be a few minutes.”

  He returned his attention to the boy with the unfortunate complexion, and I wandered up and down the corridor. I tried to match up my first impression of David Lee with the suspicion that had been nagging at me since Heather had mentioned him to me. Given their relationship, I had no trouble abstracting the teacher as Stu’s killer. I supposed there was a twisted sort of motive in there somewhere. But try as I might, I could not visualize this David Lee slipping an icepick into Stu Carver’s ear, and even though I also knew that appearances made a most unreliable basis for judging character, I still felt vaguely disappointed that Lee had not turned out to be a hulking, sneering, drooling monster.

  I stopped to read the notices on the bulletin board at the end of the hall. Baseball tryouts were coming up soon. A foreign film festival was scheduled for the weekend, featuring Ingmar Bergman. An assistant dean from Bowdoin was coming to address the student body on the subject, “How to Get the Edge in College Admissions.”

  After perhaps ten minutes, the pimpled boy left Lee’s classroom and the teacher poked his head out of the door and called to me. “You may come in now, sir.”

  I went into the classroom. It felt as if I had been there a million times before. The heating pipes along the outside wall still clanked and farted, the round clock at the rear of the room ticked loudly just as I remembered. It smelled faintly of chalk dust and old sweat and Lysol. The blackboard—actually, this blackboard was green—was covered with messy hieroglyphics intended, I gathered, to uncover the identities of such mysteries as x, and a + b, and the volume of a cone. The one-piece desks were neatly aligned in rows facing the institutional metal teacher’s desk up front, as they always had been. An American flag and a replica of Gilbert Stuart’s Georg
e Washington hung on the side wall opposite the windows.

  David Lee stood behind his desk, leaning forward on it, propped up on both of his hands. He wore a blue buttoned-down shirt with the cuffs rolled halfway up his surprisingly ropey and thickly veined forearms. His striped tie was loosened at his throat. His eyebrows were raised in inquiry behind his thick glasses.

  It gave me a strange sense of déjà vu, right down to the vague tension in my gut that reminded me of how much trouble I used to have with the volume of cones.

  Lee smiled uncertainly at me and gestured toward one of the student desks.

  “Please have a seat. If you can squeeze yourself in.”

  I folded myself in, and he moved around to sit beside me. “Now, Mr…?”

  “Coyne. Brady Coyne.”

  He frowned.

  “I am Stu Carver’s attorney.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “I assumed you were one of my students’ fathers. Whose attorney did you say?”

  “Stu Carver.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Is he a student here?”

  I sighed. “Mr. Lee,” I said, “let us not bullshit each other. I know you were friends with Stu Carver. I know about your relationship with him. I am not here to make trouble for you. There are some things that I need to know. I think you would be well advised to cooperate with me. What do you say?” I showed him my teeth.

  He stood up and wandered over to the window. He stood there for a long minute, staring out onto the wooded hillside. Then he turned, sighed, and came back and sat down. “What exactly do you know about me and Stu?”

  “Do you want me to spell it out?”

  He smiled thinly. “I guess you don’t have to. Do you mind my asking how you found out about me?”

  “Heather Kriegel told me.”

  “Ah, Heather. I’m surprised.”

  “She did it for your sake, Mr. Lee. She has told nobody else except me. Your secret is still safe.”

  He paused for a moment, then said, “I can believe that. She’s an honorable person. I guess you better explain yourself.”

  “I assume you know Stu is dead.”

  He nodded. “Heather phoned me.”

  “And that he was murdered under rather confusing circumstances. That his killer has not been apprehended. That the motive for the murder remains a mystery.”

  Lee was staring at me through his glasses. With his thinning hair and round, shapeless body, he was not a conventionally attractive man. But he had an open, pleasant face and a quiet demeanor that I thought would wear well. “Why are you telling me this?” he said.

  “Mainly, I like to see the guys in white hats win, and the bad guys get their due. It has also occurred to me that you could be in danger.”

  “Why me?”

  “You are, er, gay, if that’s the word you prefer. You also use cocaine. One or both of those factors may explain Stu’s murder. There’s at least one federal policeman who thinks so.”

  He stood up abruptly and moved to close the door. When he came back he remained standing. “Mr. Coyne,” he said, “I assume you realize that I would lose my job in about one minute if this ever got out.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m good at my work. I love it, and I need it. I don’t hurt anybody. Yes, okay, I’m gay. And, no, it’s not the word I prefer. There is nothing particularly light-hearted about people with my sexual predisposition, in spite of what some believe to be the increased enlightenment of our time. Queer is more like it, don’t you think? Or faggot. That tells it straight, if you’ll pardon the expression. Homosexual is too clinical.” He placed both hands on the desk I was sitting at and leaned toward me. “Why do we need to be called anything? I’m a man. I’m a teacher and a coach and a chess player. I’m a bad poet and a good son. I’ve got bursitis in my shoulder and a partial plate in my mouth. Define a heterosexual person, and the first thing you say about him won’t be that he’s straight. Right?”

  I nodded. “You’re right. Of course.”

  He straightened up and sighed. “I sound paranoid, I guess. I don’t really think I am. I’m sorry to lecture you.”

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry I had to mention it. But it seems relevant, in this case.”

  “Here’s the relevant question,” he said. “Can you tell me why people think that so-called gays are so much more dangerous to young people than heterosexuals? Some of the men on this staff—women, too, for that matter—are absolute rabbits, utterly promiscuous. This is not perceived as a problem. But I, who mind my business and keep my private life private, would be heaved out on my poor fat bottom if there was the remotest suspicion of what they like to call a perversion. No questions asked. No due process, not in private schools. And as for drugs, okay, another no-no. This is the biggest hypocrisy in the school. The kids are totally open—even blatant—about it. But teachers? Corrupters of the youth, all of us. Okay. Yes. Stu and I were lovers. And now and then we smoked a marijuana cigarette and used a little cocaine. In the privacy of our own homes. We hurt nobody. I don’t see how any of this could get Stu murdered, or pose a danger to me.”

  “Where did you get your drugs?”

  He shook his head. “I’d hate to have to tell anybody.”

  “You may not have a choice.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Coyne?”

  “No. I’m simply telling you that a policeman could come by with questions for you, and he might not care as much as I do about discretion.”

  Lee sighed. “I see,” he said. “All right, then. I see how it is. He’s a professor of physics at Harvard. Living in Cambridge, he has what he calls sources. I never inquired about them. He is emphatically not what you’d call a pusher, or a dealer, or any kind of criminal. He gets stuff occasionally. When he does, he’s good enough to share it. That’s all.”

  I nodded. “Has this professor ever had a problem with it? Been arrested, or threatened, or extorted? Anything like that?”

  “Not to my knowledge. He’s a highly regarded member of the faculty, fully tenured, the author of a definitive textbook. I’m certain he’s extremely careful. He has too much to lose.”

  “Stu Carver went to Harvard.”

  “So did I.”

  “Did Stu and this professor know each other?”

  “No. This man has only been at the University for seven years. Stu graduated something like twelve years ago. Anyway, Stu had no idea where I got the stuff.”

  “I’d like to know his name.”

  “I suppose you would.”

  “Well?”

  “No. I don’t think I’ll tell you. I’m certain it would do no good, and it could do much harm to a good man.”

  “Mr. Lee—”

  “The answer, Mr. Coyne, is no. Emphatically, finally, definitively no.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Let me ask you about Stu, then. Can you think of anything that would indicate he was in danger? Did he say anything to you, or did you notice anything in his behavior? Anything to do with his being threatened, or in some financial difficulty? Any new acquaintances?”

  He frowned for a minute, then slowly shook his head. “No. Nothing like that, no.”

  “When was the last time you saw Stu?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Well, it must have been late September, early October. Just before he donned his rags and went to live on the streets.”

  “You knew about his project, then.”

  “Yes. I tried to discourage him from it, but he was adamant.”

  “Why did you try to discourage him?”

  Lee smiled. “Because I knew I would miss him terribly.”

  I nodded. “And you had no communication with him after that?”

  “None. When I heard he was dead…” He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I still miss him terribly.”

  I thought for a moment, then stood up. I held out my hand to Lee. “I appreciate your time,” I said. “I’m sorry if I have upset you.”

  He g
rasped my hand. “I understand what you feel you have to do, and I hope you catch the son of a bitch who murdered Stu. I’m afraid I haven’t helped you.”

  I grinned. “Well, no, you really haven’t. Perhaps you’ll think of something. Let me give you my card. Call me if anything occurs to you, will you?” I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to him.

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  I started to leave, then turned to face him. “One more thing, Mr. Lee.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is the physics professor by any chance gay?”

  “That word again.” He laughed. “Mr. Coyne, if you’ll excuse my saying so, that is the sort of question that is produced by a stereotyped mind.”

  “You’re excused,” I said. “Whatever. Is he?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have no idea.”

  By the time I got back to my office, Julie had already left. The coffee was unplugged, the answering machine was turned on, and a thick stack of memos sat in the exact center of my desk. These were arranged according to Julie’s usual system—in descending order of her definition of urgency, from top to bottom. I glanced through them, finding, as I expected, according to my own standards of importance, the most urgent to be the least interesting.

  On top was the message that old Doc Segrue, who was embroiled in a dispute with the IRS over some investment property, had called. I made a note to phone Doc’s accountant first thing in the morning. Eileen Benson was concerned about the claim her deceased husband’s son by one of his previous marriages was making against the estate. I could smooth her feathers at my leisure. Frank Paradise had an emergency which he refused, as usual, to explain over the phone—to Julie, or to me, for that matter. I’d have to drive down to Brewster to visit him sometime soon.

  Meriam Carver had called. I knew what that one was all about. I had no intention of returning her call.

  Near the top of the stack was a note that Gloria had called. Julie considered all my messages from my former wife urgent. If Julie had her way, I would marry Gloria again. On the memo, Julie had noted, redundantly, “Something personal,” and, editorially, “sounds important.” Gloria’s phone calls were always personal, and, in her mind (as well as in Julie’s imagination), always important. She and I harbored no significant grudges against each other. We had no disputes over alimony (generous but fair), nor did we exchange recriminations over the issues that had led to the dissolution of our marriage a decade earlier (mutual agreement, spiced with a pinch of incompatibility).