Past Tense Read online

  I joined him a minute later. We shook hands and got into my car. I waved my hand around the inside. “So what’d you find?”

  He smiled. “If we found anything incriminating, I wouldn’t tell you. On the other hand, if we found anything incriminating, I probably wouldn’t be returning it to you. Feel like some lunch?”

  “Sure. Where to?”

  He directed me back to Dennis, then down a side street to a low-slung shingled place on the water. It was called the Lighthouse Tavern. Poetic license. I knew of no lighthouse on the bay side of the Cape.

  I found a slot at the far end of the jammed parking lot, and we went inside. The place featured dim, indirect lighting and soft music and dark woodwork, fishing nets with cork floats draped on the walls, fake portholes, and a solid glass back wall overlooking still another Cape Cod tidal creek. The lobby was crammed with middle-aged men in baggy shorts and tanned women in capri pants and whiny children in foul tempers, but when Vanderweigh took off his cap to reveal his bald head, the hostess looked up, smiled at him, and waved us over.

  We shouldered our way through the crowd, and when we got to the hostess, she put her hand on Vanderweigh’s arm, kissed his cheek, and led us to a table by the window. “The usual?” she said to him.

  He nodded.

  “Sir?” she said to me.

  “Coffee, please. Black.”

  She put menus in front of us. “Want to know the specials?”

  Vanderweigh shook his head, and so did I.

  When she left, I said, “Friend of yours, huh?”

  “That’s my daughter-in-law. My son owns this place. This is my table. They hold it for me unless I tell them not to. I eat here just about every day.”

  I picked up a menu. “Any recommendations?”

  “The fish is always fresh.”

  A middle-aged waitress brought iced tea for Vanderweigh and coffee for me, and the two of them talked about her son, who was working on a fishing boat out of New Bedford for the summer and planned to take business courses at UMass Dartmouth in the fall. I ended up ordering a lobster roll. Vanderweigh asked for the turkey club, no mayonnaise.

  After the waitress left, he mentioned fishing, and I told him I loved fly-fishing, so we talked about that for a while, and the more we didn’t talk about Larry Scott’s murder, the more I began to suspect that Vanderweigh knew something, or had what he thought was strong evidence of something, and that he was trying to lull me into dropping my defenses.

  Well, that was okay. Since I had no secrets, I needed no defenses.

  When our sandwiches arrived, Vanderweigh asked about my family and my job, and I answered all his questions. I had the feeling I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.

  We finished eating, the waitress cleared our table and brought more iced tea and hot coffee, and still the subject of Larry Scott’s murder had not come up.

  Then he said, “How well do you know Evelyn Banyon?”

  I smiled. “Aha.”

  “You were wondering when I’d get around to that subject.”

  “I figured you’d wait till you’d softened me up.”

  “So?”

  I shrugged. “I met her nearly a year ago. We’ve been—I never know what to call it—in a relationship, I guess you’d say, for five or six months. I know her intimately. But you’re not asking about our intimate life … are you?”

  “No.” He smiled. “But if you want to talk about it—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Of course you don’t.” He cleared his throat. “I talked with my colleague and your friend Roger Horowitz the other day. He urged me to consider you an ally. I told him it was impossible to eliminate you as a suspect in this case, and he told me that was a waste of time. I have a lot of respect for Horowitz, but I do have some doubts about you.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “I’m a good suspect. I didn’t do it. But I guess I’d suspect me, too.”

  “Horowitz rarely places much stock in somebody’s character,” he said. “We’ve both seen too many fine, upstanding people with no history of anything criminal committing horrific crimes.” He waved his hand in the air. “Anyway, for the record, and in the interest of candor, you should know that I have been unable to find any evidence that you did not commit this crime, so you have got to be a suspect. The same goes for Ms. Banyon.”

  “Any evidence that either of us did it?”

  “Compelling circumstances,” he said. “As you know.”

  I nodded. “Means, motive, and opportunity.”

  “Right. Both of you are obvious suspects, and nine times out of ten it’s just that simple. The obvious suspect is the one who did it.”

  “Occam’s razor,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Whatever.” He took a sip of iced tea, gazed out the window for a minute, then turned back to me. “We learn in cop school to pay a lot of attention to the obvious. When we don’t, we generally end up looking stupid. Remember the Stuart case?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Chuck Stuart. They found him in his car outside a hospital in Dorchester with a gunshot wound in his gut and his wife shot dead beside him. He told the police some black guy robbed them. Very plausible in that part of the city. So the cops went looking for a young black guy who fit Stuart’s description. Found him, too, and dragged him away in a flurry of flashbulbs. Turned out Stuart had set the whole thing up, killed his wife, shot himself, had his brother drive by to collect the weapon and dispose of it, invented the black suspect. Chuck Stuart ended up writing a confession and jumping off the Mystic River Bridge. Got a lot of ink, that story.”

  “That,” said Vanderweigh, “was one of those cases where there were two obvious suspects, and the Boston cops picked the wrong one. There are plenty of robberies and murders in that part of the city, and they’re almost always committed by young black men. On the other hand, whenever somebody is murdered, your first suspect has got to be the spouse.”

  “As I remember it,” I said, “when it all shook out, the Boston cops caught hell from the black community for having the temerity to actually suspect a black man from the worst neighborhood in New England of breaking the law.”

  “How it goes. Everybody fucks up sometimes.” Vanderweigh shook his head. “The worst thing is to ignore the obvious, and as it turns out, that’s what the Boston cops did. They were too willing to believe the story of a white guy, even if it did make a lot of sense. Hell, the man had a bullet hole in his stomach. Still, they forgot that he was the spouse.” He sighed. “Point is, we also learn that sometimes things aren’t that obvious. I’ve spent the last several days trying to find holes in what you and Ms. Banyon told us.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And I see three possibilities.” He held up three fingers, then bent one of them down. “One, you’re both lying.” He bent down the second finger. “Two, you’re both telling the truth. And, three”—he bent down the third finger—“one of you is lying and one of you is telling the truth.” He shook his head. “I’m bothered by the fact that if you’re both lying, and the two of you invented this story, it’s seriously flawed.”

  “Because neither of us can give the other one an alibi,” I said. “It’s not a very good story, is it?”

  He nodded. “I’d expect an experienced attorney to do better. This leads me to believe that one of you, at least, is telling the truth.”

  “The one who didn’t kill Larry Scott, you’re thinking.”

  “Right. Ms. Banyon could’ve gone running, just the way she said, and on her way back found his body. In which case, you could’ve killed him.”

  I started to speak, but he held up his hand. “Or,” he said, “she could’ve encountered him there on the driveway and knifed him while you were sleeping. Either way, one of you’s telling the truth and one’s lying.”

  “Or,” I said, “neither of us killed him and we’re both telling the truth.”

  “Of course,” said Vanderweigh. “For the sake of
argument, let’s say you’re both telling the truth.”

  “You might find that line of thought productive,” I said, “given the fact that it happens to be true.”

  “In that case,” he said, “somebody else did it.”

  “I am witnessing a brilliant deductive mind at work.”

  “Yeah, Horowitz said you had a smart mouth.” He smiled. “So the question is, if not one of you two, then who?”

  “You asking me?”

  He arched his eyebrows.

  I shook my head. “I don’t have a clue. Do you?”

  Vanderweigh stared out the window, and without turning to face me, he said quietly, “When you’ve got not one but two excellent suspects, what a good detective does is, he starts building the case. He questions the suspects. He takes testimony from witnesses. He checks backgrounds. He gathers forensic evidence. He looks for the anomaly, the fact that doesn’t fit, the thing that makes him doubt his case, and he tries to maintain his objectivity. A good detective does want to get it right, Mr. Coyne, because he does not want some competent defense lawyer making him look stupid. But when he can’t find any anomaly, he doesn’t see much purpose in looking around for other, less obvious suspects.”

  “You’re telling me that Evie and I are your only suspects.”

  He turned his head, looked at me for a minute, then shrugged.

  I planted my forearms on the table and leaned toward him. “So why are you telling me these things, Detective? What’s this”—I waved my hand around the restaurant—“this friendly lunch all about?”

  “Was it that friendly?”

  I smiled. “It was friendly enough.”

  “I didn’t give anything away, did I?”

  “Nothing I haven’t already thought of. I was hoping you’d tell me what your forensics experts turned up.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Sure.”

  He shrugged. “They concluded that Lawrence Scott died of two knife wounds to the abdomen sometime between five and seven A.M. on Saturday morning. They found no defense wounds on his hands or arms.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” he said, “that he was standing very close to his assailant and didn’t expect to be attacked, that he didn’t see it coming.”

  “You think he knew his killer?” I said.

  “Very likely,” said Vanderweigh.

  Larry Scott knew Evie well. He had also made my acquaintance. “What else did forensics find?” I said.

  “Scott died where he fell,” he said. “The sand under his body was saturated with blood. According to the medical examiner, his body had not been moved.”

  “That’s why I got my car back so soon,” I said. “You knew we hadn’t transported a dead body in it.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he said.

  “But my car was clean.”

  “Clean?” He laughed. “They found a fully packed overnight bag, not to mention pieces of monofilament, old fishhooks, dirty socks, rubber boots, a couple of hats, dried mud, pine needles, an old Army blanket—”

  “That’s what a trunk is for,” I said.

  Vanderweigh nodded. “That steak knife was the murder weapon, Mr. Coyne, and it was, in fact, a match for seven other six-inch steak knives that were in the kitchen drawer of that cottage you were renting.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “The key was under the doormat,” I said. “Anybody could’ve gotten in there. Evie and I were gone all afternoon and well into the evening on Friday.”

  He shrugged. “A serrated knife is a nasty weapon. The ME figured the victim was standing up when the first thrust was made. It went up under the rib cage and ripped into his heart. Right-handed blow, delivered with enough force to make a bruise where it entered. A mortal wound. He fell on his back and died within a couple of minutes. The killer stabbed him again in the belly for good measure, also up to the hilt, then threw the weapon into the bushes.”

  “You’re reading a lot of anger in those blows.”

  “They weren’t halfhearted, that’s for sure.”

  “What about footprints or tire tracks? Find anything in Scott’s pockets? Where was his car? Where was he staying? What about witnesses?”

  Vanderweigh laughed. “Don’t push it, Mr. Coyne. You don’t expect me to tell you everything.”

  “Obviously you didn’t find any fingerprints on that knife,” I said, “or you’d know for sure that it wasn’t Evie or me.”

  “Or that it was. You’re right. It’s too bad.”

  “So none of your evidence exonerates either of us, then.”

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t. Thing is, I’m pretty convinced it wasn’t the both of you, working together, who killed Mr. Scott. If it was, one of you would’ve confessed it, or at least slipped up, when we questioned you, and surely you would’ve come up with better alibis for each other.”

  “But you do think it was one of us.”

  He started to say something, then shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I guess all I’m saying is, I’m still in the market for suspects. As it is, Horowitz says it couldn’t possibly be you, and that leaves me with your friend.”

  “Evie didn’t kill anybody.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “You’re the one who’s got to make the case,” I said.

  “We’ve got a damn good circumstantial case, Mr. Coyne. Means, opportunity, and more motive than you can imagine.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “How well do you really know Ms. Banyon?”

  I looked at him and said nothing. That was the question he’d started our conversation with.

  Vanderweigh picked up his iced-tea glass, tilted it up until the half-melted ice cubes clicked against his teeth, drained it, and put it down on the table. “Well,” he said, “I gotta get back to work.” He started to stand up.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Go home, Mr. Coyne.”

  “What about Evie? What did you mean, ‘more motive than I could imagine’?”

  “You talked to her lately?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me neither.”

  I stared at him. “If you needed to have this conversation with me, you certainly wanted to talk with Evie, too.”

  “When you see her,” he said, “tell her it makes a bad impression, not responding to a polite request after a police officer specifically tells you it’s important to be cooperative.”

  “You’ve tried to reach her?”

  He shrugged.

  “She’s avoiding you?”

  “We’d very much like to talk with her,” he said. “The fact that we’ve tried without success …”

  I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that Evie was acting guilty.

  FIVE

  I called Evie after supper that night. When her machine answered, I hung up, hesitated, then dialed her again and left a message. “It’s me, honey,” I said. “I retrieved my car today down in Brewster and had lunch with Detective Vanderweigh. You and I have got to talk. Please call me.”

  I kept my portable phone by my feet on the coffee table while I read the newspaper with one eye and watched the Red Sox beat the Tigers with the other. Evie didn’t call. I tried her again after the game, got her machine, and didn’t bother leaving another message. I called a third time after I crawled into bed around midnight. This time after her message, I said, “It’s me again. I know you’re listening. Come on, honey. Please pick up the phone. I guess you’re still mad at me. Well, I’m sorry about that, but we’ve got to talk about what happened last weekend. Detective Vanderweigh wants to talk to you, too, and you can’t just ignore him. It makes it look bad for you.”

  I waited. But she did not pick up the phone.

  When I got to work on Friday morning, the second thing I did after pouring myself a mug of coffee was call Evie’s
office at Emerson Hospital in Concord. When she didn’t answer, I left a message on her voice mail. “We’ve really got to talk,” I said. “It’s important. Call me when you get in.”

  I had nonstop meetings with clients scheduled for the morning, so I went out to the reception area and told Julie that if Evie called, she should interrupt me, that I absolutely needed to talk with her.

  Julie frowned at me. “What’s going on, Brady?”

  I had told Julie all about the events of the previous weekend. I always told Julie everything. “I can’t get ahold of her,” I said. “It’s starting to look like the police think she killed that man, and she’s avoiding them, too. It makes her look guilty. Actually, I’m a little worried.”

  “You think something’s happened to her?”

  I shrugged.

  “You don’t think she actually could have—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Not Evie. Evie couldn’t kill anybody.” I shook my head. “I guess I just don’t know. Truthfully, I don’t know what to think.”

  “She’s mad at you,” said Julie. “I don’t blame her. You’re easy to get mad at.”

  “Yeah, well, in this case—”

  “Brady, for heaven’s sake, think about it. She found the body of that man who’d been stalking her. If that’s not bad enough, then she gets interrogated by the police for hours. What should she expect from her best friend, her lover, her—her rock?”

  “I thought I was quite supportive.”

  “Supportive?” Julie rolled her pretty blue eyes. “You’ve got to do better than supportive, Brady Coyne.” She pronounced the word “supportive” as if it meant a disgusting animal waste product. “I bet you were all lawyerly and rational, eager to discuss the facts of the case, ponder evidence, devise strategies. Am I right?”

  “I had it in the back of my mind that she might’ve done it,” I said. “But I didn’t say that to her.”

  “God!” She shook her head. “If you think she didn’t pick up on that, you understand women even less than I thought.”