Marine Corpse Page 13

  I nodded and smiled.

  “Aw, now, Mr. Coyne, you don’t wanna go messing around in something you can’t handle. Maybe I’ll send a couple boys over there to ask around.”

  “Think they’ll learn anything?”

  He stared at me. “Nope,” he said finally. “They won’t talk to cops. But, look. They won’t talk to you, either, so don’t go doing something stupid.”

  “No harm in having a drink, now, is there?”

  “At the Sow’s Ear? Yep. There just might be harm in it. Take my advice…. Ah, forget it. I don’t imagine you take advice very good. Listen. Let me know anything you hear, willya?”

  “Sure. I’ll do that.” I stood up. “I haven’t had my supper yet, and between that delicious looking sandwich of yours and this uplifting conversation, my stomach’s starting to growl. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to get going.”

  “You find out what you wanted?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Did you?”

  He grinned. “You were a big help.”

  He reached across his desk without standing, and we shook hands.

  “The Marine corpse,” Santis said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “That’s what the ME called that stiff we found last winter. The one who pissed on the third rail. The Marine corpse. Closest I’ve ever seen that doctor come to smiling, when he came out with that one. Thing is, we checked the dead guy’s fingerprints, like we always do. Guess what?”

  “He wasn’t a Marine at all,” I said.

  “Jeez,” said Santis. “You’re right.”

  I had my hand on the doorknob when Santis said, “Hey, Mr. Coyne, do me a favor, will you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t let that Mickey Gillis get ahold of this story, huh? She’s a fuckin’ vulture, know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “Her column’s the first thing I read in the paper.”

  I didn’t bother telling him that Mickey Gillis was an old friend of mine.

  When we were seniors in high school together, Maureen Sadowski was voted “Class Athletic Supporter.” This sophomoric play on words was meant to convey, for one thing, that Mickey was a jock such as girls’ sports had rarely seen, in those days when they were not allowed to cross the midcourt line in basketball, and seemed to pride themselves on their inability to throw a ball like a boy. Mickey Sadowski roamed centerfield like the Yankee centerfielder of the same era—from whom she derived her nickname. She hit slashing line drives, slid into bases, and often as not came up swinging her fists at startled, pony-tailed shortstops. She could dribble a basketball with both hands, drive the baseline, and she was considered a genuine freak because she could shoot a jump shot.

  She had a hard little athletic body and a wide mouth that usually wore an expression that could have been either a sneer or a grin—and, as I got to know her, I realized it was usually a little of each. She had the best legs in school, and in an era when skirts were generally worn ankle-length over layers of petticoats, Mickey favored tight skirts with a hemline at the knee.

  Mickey Sadowski was also an athletic supporter of a different kind. It was no secret that at one time or another she had supported most of the members of the high school football team from a supine position—including a big, awkward tight end named Brady Coyne.

  Mickey Sadowski, in the locker-room parlance of the day, “put out.”

  I thought I was in love with her for a while, and one starry summer night when we lay beside each other on an Army blanket spread over the pine needles up on Granny Hill, she having just finished supporting me with more finesse than I had reciprocated, I said to her, “Doesn’t it bother you? Your reputation, I mean?”

  “Does it bother you?” she asked.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I really like you, Mickey.”

  “I like you, too,” she said. “I can talk with you. The others, they don’t like to talk. They just grunt and groan and then when they’re done they just want to take me home.”

  “Why do you do it then?”

  “Same reason you do. I like it. It’s fun. It feels good. You think boys are the only ones who like to fuck?”

  It was typical of Mickey to use words that boys thought belonged exclusively to them. It was also, I learned, typical that she perceived no significant difference between herself and us members of the other gender.

  I visited Mickey a few times while she was at Smith College. We’d go drinking at Rahar’s and then drive down a dirt road alongside a tobacco field near the Connecticut River and make imaginative love in the back seat of my Volkswagen. I had, by then, accepted Mickey’s understanding that she and I were good friends who shared several common interests—sports, Buddy Holly songs, and sex.

  She ended up marrying an engineer from MIT named Brendan Gillis, a young man with a large Adam’s apple and terrific prospects. They moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where Brendan made a lot of money and Mickey had two miscarriages. I hung around Boston, got married, and lost track of her until her byline began to turn up in the Globe. She started as a reporter on the City Hall beat, but within a year they gave her a three-times-a-week column. She wrote about cops and dope peddlers, old folks in the projects whose welfare checks were getting stolen from their mailboxes, delinquents who managed to slither through the judicial cracks, and Red Sox pitchers who threw too many gopher balls.

  She wrote, she liked to say, the same way she played ball: like a man.

  I ran into her now and then around the city. Her hair, which in her youth had been long and silky black, was now cut short and flecked with gray. Her vanilla skin had coarsened and her voice rasped from cigarettes and booze. She still had great legs and, from what she said to me, I gathered that her interest in sports and sex had not waned over the years.

  Her reputation as a vulture was well earned and widely repeated. Al Santis had not made it up. Mickey Gillis could smell the rotting carcass of a political coverup or high level incompetence with uncanny acuity, and she would swoop down on it and begin to peck at it, and nobody could drive her off.

  It was no wonder that Santis feared her. Everybody did.

  Hard little kernels of sleet were rattling against the sliding glass doors that opened onto my balcony over the harbor six floors up. Outside my apartment, the purple of the ocean was about three shades darker than the sky, and here and there against the darkness the running lights of big ocean-going tankers and the landing lights of airliners homing in on Logan by instrument blinked and winked through the storm.

  It didn’t seem all that much cozier inside.

  I kicked off my shoes, tossed my topcoat and jacket and tie in the direction of the sofa, and rinsed out two tumblers that had spent the past few days in the sink. I set them on the dining table by the sliders and poured each half full of Jack Daniel’s. Then I set myself down, lifted one of the tumblers, clicked it against the other, and held it aloft toward the ocean outside.

  “To you, Altoona, old friend,” I said. “And to beautiful women.” I downed the contents.

  I put it down, raised the other one, and tossed it off, too.

  When you live alone, as I do, you had better enjoy your own companionship. I do. I have interesting discussions with myself from time to time, and that evening as I sat staring out at the darkness and feeling the loss of another friend, I debated what I should do about it.

  On the one hand, I was a middle-aged lawyer with no particular talent—or stomach—for the investigation of violent crimes.

  On the other hand, I had lost two friends whom I cared about, and it pissed me off.

  On the first hand, it was clearly a police matter.

  On the second hand, Al Santis had not encouraged me that they were pursuing it with diligence.

  On the first hand, again, I could hurt myself. I did not like pain.

  On the other hand, in this case it just might be worth the risk.

  It went on for a while, oiled by two mo
re tumblers of Black Jack—these sipped slowly, savored pensively—and when the debate was over, the other hand was declared a winner by unanimous decision. I would do what I could, and if it turned out not to be much, at least I would have tried. And if I got hurt—well, sometimes debate judges make mistakes.

  I put the tumblers back into the sink, pried the top off a can of chili, and dumped it into a pot. I sprinkled a heaping tablespoon each of chili powder and paprika on top, because they never make the canned stuff hot enough, and put it on low heat. Then I went to the telephone.

  Gus Becker answered on the second ring.

  “This is Brady Coyne,” I said.

  “Oh. Oh, sure. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I want to help.”

  “Help?”

  “With the investigation.”

  He was silent for a minute. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Stuart Carver. Right. You want to help.”

  “I do. Yes.”

  “Well. Hm. Listen, I appreciate that, Mr. Coyne. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure there’s much you can really do.”

  “I know. I’m not either. But another man has been killed the same way Stu Carver was, and he was a friend of mine, too, and I feel like I need to do something. So I want to help.”

  “Another man?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I summarized for him what I had learned from Al Santis.

  “Sounds to me like maybe the police are right and I’m wrong,” Becker observed. “It was a long shot anyway. It could very well be some nut out there. And if it is, you better leave it to the proper authorities. I seem to be drawing a blank with the drug connection in any case. Listen, you haven’t happened to come up with any more notebooks, have you?”

  “No. I don’t think there are any more.”

  “Maybe. But in what you gave me there are these references, hints, like, that seem to suggest there’s more. Look. If you really want to help out with this thing, the best way would be for you to come up with those other notebooks, if there are any.”

  “There are a few things you should know,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “One, Stu Carver did do a little drugs. His roommate insists it was only recreational, as they say. Two, he had a boyfriend, and he was the one who had the stuff. Three, this boyfriend got it from a physics professor at Harvard.”

  “And his roommate being the girl.”

  “Right.”

  “Think she’s telling the truth?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure she’s telling me what she thinks is the truth.”

  “That’s not exactly the same thing.”

  “Granted.”

  “What about the boyfriend?”

  “I talked to him. I don’t know. He’s a teacher and he’s pretty petrified of being found out. Both on the drugs and on the homosexuality.”

  “Understandable.” Becker paused. “None of this exactly fits with what I’m investigating.”

  “Well, you’re investigating a drug thing and I’m interested in two murders. I don’t see why we can’t try to help each other.”

  “I’m not sure that would be equitable,” he said. “Look, Mr. Coyne. I don’t want to sound unkind, or ungrateful, but I really do think that you ought to leave the detective work to the detectives, just the way your client, Senator Woodhouse, wants you to.”

  “Ben Woodhouse isn’t my client anymore,” I said.

  “Well, whatever. I still think you ought not to get involved. Don’t you?”

  “No, not really. But thanks for the advice.”

  “Was there something else?”

  “No,” I said. “Anyway, my chili’s bubbling. Gotta go.”

  “I hope you’ll keep in touch. I’m still interested in those notebooks.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I mean it,” he said. “About letting the police do their thing.”

  “Right,” I said, and I hung up.

  I took the chili to the table and ate it out of the pot, alternating hot spoonfuls with cold swigs of Molson’s ale. Becker’s indifferent response to the information I had given him confused me at first. But as I thought it through, I realized that Altoona’s murder, identical to Stu’s, diminished the likelihood of a drug connection. And Stu’s casual use of drugs, assuming that’s what it was, didn’t fit into Becker’s hypothesis, either. From what he said, he didn’t find anything in the notebooks to implicate Stu. I understood that Carver’s death was just a secondary piece of Becker’s investigation. He wasn’t interested in the murder at all, really—only where its resolution might lead him. If a crackpot killed Stu—and Altoona—then it was of no interest whatsoever to Gus Becker.

  But it was still of interest to me.

  I timed it so that I’d follow the last spoonful of chili with the last swig of the second bottle of ale. Then I lit a cigarette and went back to the phone.

  TWELVE

  JOEY, MY YOUNGER SON, answered the phone. “Hullo?”

  “You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” I said.

  “Oh, hi there, Pop. Eatin’ a piece of pie. Sorry.”

  “Your mother’s chocolate cream, I’ll bet.”

  “Lemon meringue.”

  “Yum. So. What else are you up to?”

  “Just watching the tube, pigging out. The usual.”

  “School?”

  “Senior slump time. You wanna talk to Mom?”

  “Please. But listen. It’s been great engaging in meaningful discourse with you. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

  “Sure. Hang on a sec.”

  I heard him yell, “Hey, Ma. It’s the old man.”

  A moment later Gloria picked up the extension. “You can hang up now, dear,” she said.

  Joey said, “Okay. Bye, Pop.”

  “The old man,” I said.

  She chuckled. “And I’ve become the old lady. So what do you expect?”

  “Whatever happened to honoring thy father and thy mother? What about civility?”

  “We never did give them much religious training.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “They’re teenagers. That’s it.” She sighed. “Anyway, how are you, Brady?”

  “I’m okay. Returning your call. What’s up?”

  “Why does something have to be up?”

  “You called.”

  “Can’t I call you without something being up?”

  “How long do you want to do this, Gloria?”

  “Do what?”

  “Sparring. Thrusting and parrying. Come on. When you do that, it’s because there’s something unpleasant you have to say to me, and you’re afraid I’ll be angry or upset, but you know you have to say it anyway. So out with it.”

  “Well,” she said. Then she hesitated. “Well, okay.” She paused again. “You really do know me, don’t you?”

  “All too well. Come on, Gloria. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Billy.”

  “That’s no surprise.”

  She sighed. “He wants to quit school.”

  “And?”

  “And? What do you mean, ‘and’? That’s it. Our number one son, the kid with that one-hundred-forty-something IQ who could’ve gone to Harvard or any place but decided to go to UMass because he didn’t want his friends to think he was a snob, and who refused to apply for scholarships because his old man was loaded, and who started growing a beard and used his first shot at the franchise to vote Socialist Labor—he says college isn’t real. That’s what he’s saying, Brady. ‘College isn’t real.’ Actually, if you can believe it, he said, ‘College ain’t real.’” Gloria took a deep breath. “I thought you’d be furious,” she finished in a small voice.

  “Hmm,” I observed.

  “You think I’m overreacting?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you do, don’t you?”

  “Come on, Gloria.”

  “You think I should say to him, ‘Well, that’s just fin
e, dear. That’s your decision, and we respect your decision. You’re a big boy. It’s your life.’ You think I should say that?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I heard her snort, an abrupt, mirthless laugh. “Well, it’s too late.”

  “That’s not what you said to him.”

  “No.”

  “Funny, but that doesn’t surprise me. So what did you say to him?”

  “I said, ‘Your father will be furious.’”

  I laughed. “You are truly a piece of work, Gloria.”

  “We make a good pair, don’t we?”

  “We did.”

  “We still do, you know.”

  I found myself smiling and nodding as I sat there in my apartment staring out into the night. “Okay, Gloria. I’ll talk to him.”

  “What will you say?”

  “I’ll be furious.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Hey, I’ll give it my best shot.”

  “Look, if you don’t think…”

  “Hey, I’ll work on conjuring up some fury. I can do it.”

  “He shouldn’t quit, Brady. You always taught the boys never to quit. Remember when Joey was playing Little League?”

  “Okay. I’m getting furious. I think I’ve got a handle on it now.”

  “The way that awful man never put him into the games, and yelled at the kids when they made errors? Remember? And you told Joey to tough it out, to prove who was the best man? Tough it out, you said.”

  “Sure, I remember. You were all for slicing off the guy’s testicles with something dull and rusty, as I recall. Not that this is the same thing.”

  “Close enough,” she said. “Listen. You interested in home-made lemon meringue pie sometime?”

  “Sounds like a bribe to me.”

  “It is a bribe, and you know it,” she said softly.

  “Yes, I do know that.”

  “Let’s get together.”

  “We should do that,” I said. And we said good-bye and disconnected, leaving it that way, with a vague promise that fell short of a commitment.

  Snowflakes the size of dimes sifted and swirled in my headlights the next night when I picked up Zerk at his place in North Cambridge and pointed my BMW toward the city.