Dutch Blue Error Read online

  He nodded. “Yeah. Me, too. I’m truly sorry I ever let you talk me into going there.”

  “You had to. Somebody saw you there.”

  “Sure. Bet somebody saw you there, too.”

  I nodded. “Yes. Somebody did.”

  “But you’re not going into any lineup.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Mothafucks.” Zerk sipped his coffee, his face dark and furrowed. “The law. Justice. Piss on it.”

  I lit a cigarette and sipped my coffee. Zerk was silent. We avoided each other’s eyes.

  Finally I said, “Look. I’ve got to know some things.”

  His eyes shifted to meet mine. “Things?”

  “Yes. Like, what time did you get to the museum? And why did you go there in the first place? And how long were you there before you found me? And where in the museum did you go before you went to Albert’s laboratory? Those kinds of things.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  I banged the table with my fist. “God damn it, will you listen to me! You were there. And they’re looking for a black man who fits your general description for the Shaughnessey murder. Sooner or later the Cambridge cops and the Boston cops are going to put their heads together and make a connection.”

  “My ‘general description.’ Yeah. A black man. Period.”

  “You’ll have trouble making a civil rights case out of it, my friend.”

  Zerk pondered his coffee cup for a moment, then he looked up at me. “Yeah. Okay, so you’re right. Now what?”

  “For now, I’m your lawyer. I’m rusty as hell on criminal law, Zerk, but if you’re really in any trouble, I’ll get you the best damn lawyer in town. In the meantime, I can take care of your rights.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “It’s the least I can do for the man who saved my life.”

  “I didn’t save your fuckin’ life,” he said. But he looked into my eyes, and the creases in his face seemed to smooth out a little. “Wouldn’t save your honkie life, Counselor. Not worth saving. No sir. I just didn’t want to lose a good job. That’s all. Watching out for old number one.”

  I smiled. “You’re learning. Learning fast.”

  Two days later Leo Kirk showed up at my office. He was accompanied by a dumpy guy named Stone with big jowls and no hair, whom he introduced as his partner.

  “Kirk and Stone,” I said. “Sounds like a law firm.”

  “Would that it were,” said Kirk gloomily. “I hate having to work for a living.”

  Stone puffed a little cigar with a plastic tip. It was dwarfed in the vast, red expanse of his face. “Let’s not fuck around, Leo,” he said. He kept the cigar clenched in his teeth when he talked. “Let’s just get to it.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve decided that maybe Francis Shaughnessey wasn’t murdered by some random burglar. You’ve been talking to Mullins in Cambridge. You want to ask me a few questions.”

  “Not quite,” said Kirk. “Actually, we want to ask your associate a few questions. Mr. Garrett.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “He’s right,” said Stone. “I told you. Let’s just take him along;”

  Kirk ignored his partner. “This is not, uh, official, Mr. Coyne. We’re not accusing Mr. Garrett of anything. We’re coming into your place of business, disrupting your routine, and we would like a few minutes of the man’s time. That’s all.”

  “Very considerate,” I said. “It’s all right with me. I can’t speak for Mr. Garrett.”

  “Look,” said Kirk earnestly. “As far as I’m concerned, what happened in Cambridge the other day is just a coincidence. I really haven’t…”

  “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” I said.

  “See?” said Stone.

  “But Zerk had nothing to do with either of them,” I finished.

  Kirk sighed. “Well, I don’t know. But, see, we got this eyewitness who saw a guy outside Shaughnessey’s place that night, and we got a sketch…”

  “Black guy,” I said.

  “Right. Black guy. Big. Six-one, two.”

  “Curly hair, probably.”

  “Aw, come on, Mr. Coyne. You know better than that.”

  “I know that white people see big black guys on the street at night and that’s all they see—big black guys. Must be several thousand big black guys in Boston. Many of them can be seen on the streets.”

  Stone reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper. He smoothed it open and laid it on my desk. “Big black guy with a neat little mustache. Looks a lot like Harry Belafonte. Except blacker. And,” he added, narrowing his eyes, “our witness happens to be a domestic for some nice rich folks in Louisburg Square. Black lady.”

  I examined the sketch. It looked like Zerk. It looked a lot like him. The eyes, the hairline, the mouth. I glanced up at the two detectives. “Okay. I’ll call him in. If you guys don’t mind, I think I’ll stay while you talk to him.”

  Kirk shrugged, and I pressed the button on the intercom.

  “Yeah?” came Zerk’s voice.

  “Come in for a minute, will you?”

  “You gentlemen need coffee? Sweet rolls?”

  “Cut the shit, Zerk. Come in here, please.”

  “Yassah,” he said.

  When he came in I introduced him to Kirk and Stone. He scowled when he shook their hands.

  “Couple questions, Mr. Garrett,” said Kirk.

  “What is this?” said Zerk to me.

  “They’re investigating the Shaughnessey murder.”

  “Aha!”

  “Where were you on the evening of Monday, September eighteenth?” said Stone.

  “I was murdering this guy up on Beacon Hill. I’ve got this heavy habit, see, man, and I was, see, strung out…”

  “Don’t fuck with us,” said Stone, his eyes squinting through the smoke that curled up from his little cigar.

  “Just answer him, Zerk,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I sighed. “We’re lawyers. We want to help them solve their case.”

  “I’m helping. I’m confessing.”

  “Don’t, Zerk.”

  “They got it all figured out. You know that.”

  “Do you remember where you were that evening?” said Kirk.

  “No.”

  “Please try.”

  “Do you remember where you were that night?”

  “We’re asking the questions, boy,” said Stone.

  Zerk turned slowly to face the fat man. “You call me ‘boy’ again and I’ll break open your face. Cop or no cop.”

  Stone didn’t flinch. “I wish you’d try,” he said.

  “I don’t remember,” said Zerk to Kirk. “Okay? Want to take me in now?”

  “Is there any way you can check? Someone you might have been with—an appointment, a date, someone who might have called you at home?” Kirk smiled apologetically. “Please try to think.”

  “I don’t keep a diary.”

  “Do you own a gun?” said Stone.

  “No.”

  “Stolen any automobiles lately?” Stone’s mouth twitched into a grin.

  “Listen, you fucker…”

  I reached up and held Zerk’s arm: “Cool it,” I said to him. Then I spoke to Stone. “What are you talking about?”

  “Akron, Ohio. March, 1972. One fourteen-year-old juvenile name of Xerxes Garrett was picked up joy-riding in a new Oldsmobile, He didn’t own it.”

  “Aw, man,” said Zerk.

  “That is not relevant,” I said, glaring at Stone. “And you know it.”

  “You’re right,” said Kirk. He spread his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “Please understand, Mr. Garrett. You are accused of nothing. Your past is, as Mr. Coyne says, completely irrelevant. We are simply doing our job. We have an eyewitness who provided us with this composite”—he held up the sketch—“and we know you were at the scene of the Dopplinger murder. Not,” he added quickly, holding up his ha
nd and smiling, “that you’re accused of anything there, either. But as you can see, looking at this sketch, there is a certain resemblance.”

  Zerk barely glanced at the sketch. Then he turned to me. “Do I have to go through this?”

  I shook my head. “No. No, you don’t.” I spoke to Kirk. “I think it’s time to terminate this interview.”

  Kirk nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” To Zerk he said, “Mr. Garrett, I’m sorry for this. I hope you understand our position.” He held out his hand.

  Zerk ignored the proffered handshake. “I understand a lot.”

  Stone jabbed out his cigar in the ashtray on my desk. “We’ll be back, boy. You ain’t seen the last of us.”

  Zerk grinned evilly. “You better have a friend with you when you see me next time.”

  When the two detectives left, I said to Zerk, “You didn’t behave yourself very well, you know.”

  “I knew this was going to happen. I told you when we were at Cambridge that they’d be after me. There’s more justice in Little Rock, for Christ’s sake, than there is in Boston.” He began to pace around my office. “Where were you on the night of so-and-so? Do you own a gun? Stolen any cars lately? What about our eyewitness who actually saw a black man on that very night? Oh, man!”

  “What about the car?” I said.

  He whirled to face me. “What about it? I’m walking home from the library, for Christ’s sake, and my buddy pulls up in a new car and offers me a ride. So I get in and a minute later we’re pulled over. What do you call that?”

  “Bad luck. Bad judgment.”

  “Yeah. So I get a juvenile sheet. That’s supposed to be buried. So how do these guys find out about that?”

  I shrugged. “Simple phone call. Off the record. You know how it works.”

  “But they can’t…”

  “In a court of law, if they mention it the case could be thrown out, right. Look. Stone was trying to rile you. You know the drill.”

  “Damn right I do. What do you think I wanted to be a lawyer for?”

  “If you want to be an effective lawyer, you’ve got to learn to control yourself.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he grumbled. But he seemed to relax. He dropped heavily, onto my sofa.

  “Look,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, okay? They’re fishing, you know that. About all they’ve got to go on in either of these cases is what we’ve told them.”

  He sighed. “I don’t think I exactly allayed their suspicions, did I?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “So now what do we do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Forget it. Get back to work.”

  He reached over and picked up the sketch from my desk. “This does look a little like me, doesn’t it?” he said. “It sure as hell does.”

  9

  NEW ENGLAND NOR’EASTERS COME sweeping down the coast driving hard, cold rains ahead of them. When they come in early autumn, the old-timers call them “line storms,” since they demarcate the boundary line between summer and fall. Time for the fishermen to haul in their boats, pull in the lobster pots, and hang up their nets for winter mending.

  For those of us who don’t make a living hard by the sea, line storms remind us to put away our tropical suits, golf clubs, and fly rods.

  This one came on the first Sunday afternoon of October. I watched its arrival from my balcony. The clouds began to roll in around noontime, sending the harbor boats scurrying for shelter. By the middle of the afternoon, the clouds were packed in solid, hanging dark and low over the water, which the winds were whipping into a gray froth. The rain came at a sharp angle, low and fast. It moved in from the black horizon, raced across the tops of the whitecaps, and arrived at my apartment building with startling suddenness. It rattled against the windows like a skyful of pebbles.

  I poured myself a double shot of Jack Daniel’s and sat at my table to watch the storm. Even after it got too dark to see, I remained sitting there, reluctant to get up to turn on a light. I thought of my parents, both dead for many years, and the Sunday evenings of my childhood when we all huddled around the big Philco radio in the living room listening to “The Shadow” and eating popcorn, and I recalled the vague depression that came with the realization that my Sunday evenings wouldn’t always be so cozy.

  Sometime after eight o’clock I forced myself to get up and turn on some lights. I flicked on the television and dumped a can of Chef Boy-R-Dee cheese ravioli into a saucepan. I put it on low heat and left it there to simmer while I sipped some more bourbon in front of the tube. What I saw was considerably less entertaining than “The Shadow”—a trick of memory, probably, rather than an objective assessment.

  The phone, when it rang, startled me.

  “No one home,” I said to it.

  It kept ringing. I resented its intrusion into my melancholy introspection. I sighed and picked it up.

  “This is Brady Coyne,” I said in a singsong voice, “I’m not home right now. If you’ll leave your name and number I’ll get back to you right away.”

  “Try to be nice, will you?” It was Deborah Martinelli. “I need to talk with you.”

  “At the sound of the tone, please leave…”

  “They broke into my house.”

  I hesitated. “Are you okay?” I remembered the big brown stain on Francis Shaughnessey’s carpet.

  “I’m okay. I was out this afternoon. When I got back…”

  “Was anything taken?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Well, no. I called you.”

  “The stamp, do you think?”

  “What else? They must’ve been after the stamp. My place is a mess. They broke the window of my back door.”

  “Like at your father’s place.”

  “Yes.”

  “And nothing is missing.”

  “I said no.”

  “Call the police, Deborah. That’s all you can do.”

  “And what will they do?”

  “They’ll come, look around, talk to you. They may try to lift some fingerprints, look for footprints and tire tracks outside. That sort of thing.”

  “Sure. Right.” There was a long pause. “You’re not for hire, huh?”

  “No.”

  I heard her sigh. Outside, the rain ticked against the windows. It seemed to come softer, now, no longer driven in brittle sheets by the wind. Way out beyond my window I could detect the line where different shades of gray touched to separate the ocean from the sky.

  “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll call the cops, then.”

  “That’s what you should do.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Sorry I bothered you.”

  I didn’t answer.

  She coughed and cleared her throat. “Look,” she said, “I know enough to call the cops. You didn’t have to tell me that. I didn’t call you so you could tell me that.”

  I waited.

  “I told you why I called. I need to talk with you.”

  “We can talk.”

  “God! You don’t make things easy.” I heard her take a deep breath. “Listen,” she said, her voice low and controlled. “The last thing I want is pity. But my father’s been murdered. Someone broke into his house and killed him. Today someone broke into my house! I don’t feel all that secure, you know? What if I’d been home?”

  “They probably timed it so you’d be out.”

  “Whatever. They found nothing. So they’ll be back.”

  “The police will take care of you.”

  “You’re making me grovel, you know that?”

  I hesitated. “Yes. I guess I am.”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I guess I do.”

  I thought of the cold rain and the old warmth of my parents’ living room. I thought of Deborah Martinelli, alone in her ransacked house, and willing to ask for help. I thought
of her haunted, silvery eyes and the smooth band of flesh between her sweatshirt and the top of her jeans.

  “Okay,” I said. “All right. Call the police. Don’t touch anything. Tell me how to get there.”

  It took me more than an hour to get to Deborah’s place in Carlisle. The highway was littered with the corpses of automobiles with their hoods raised like the mouths of giant birds gaping for food. Victims, I assumed, of drowned engines.

  She lived several miles beyond the center of Concord. The road gleamed under my headlights, and I had to keep the windshield wipers on fast speed as the rain continued to fall heavily. I drove past horse farms and woodlands, took a couple of right turns as she had directed me, and found her cedar-and-glass contemporary house snuggled into a pine grove. Her little red Karmann Ghia sat under a carport. A police cruiser was parked behind it. I pulled up beside the cruiser and went to the door.

  Deborah answered my knock. She wore tailored yellow slacks and a pale, flowered blouse. Her hair was tied back with a kerchief that matched her slacks. She seemed calm, and even managed one of her sad smiles for me.

  “Oh, come in, please. Don’t mind the mud. Here, let me take your coat. I’m sorry. The place is such a mess.”

  I touched her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, sure. I’m fine.” Again the quick, nervous smile.

  She fluttered around me like a mother bird at her nestlings, picking at my trenchcoat, poking at her hair, and flashing her smile on and off. She was in worse shape than I had expected.

  I took her arm and guided her into the living room, where a uniformed policeman sat on the sofa, a notebook poised on his knee. The floor on one side of the room lay ankle deep in strewn papers. An old rolltop desk had been pulled away from the wall at an angle. Its drawers hung open and empty like a beggar’s pockets.

  “Ah, Mr. Coyne, this is Officer Ellis. Mr. Coyne is my lawyer.”

  I glanced at her and saw no hint of irony on her face. I shook hands with Ellis, who lifted his eyebrows at me and darted his eyes toward Deborah.

  “Could I have a cup of tea?” I said to her. She nodded and left the room. I sat on the sofa beside the policeman.

  “Thanks,” said Ellis after she was gone. “The lady is none too coherent. Kept telling me how her father had been killed, how the same guy was after her now. You’re her lawyer, maybe you can make some sense of this for me.”