Death at Charity's Point Read online

  “Oh,” she said. “Harvey.” Her cheeks flushed.

  “Yes. Do you know where he might be?”

  “The track. He’s probably at practice. You’re not the guy from Duke.”

  “No. I’m not from Duke.”

  “U.C.L.A.? Harvey told me the U.C.L.A. guy’s supposed to be coming this week. You from there?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m from Yale.”

  “Oh, wow! That’s awesome. The Ivy League.”

  The girl wore a scent that reminded me of Gloria’s bridge parties. I wondered what she looked like without her glasses.

  I wandered out behind the cluster of brick buildings to the complex of playing fields where I had talked with Coach Warren Baker a couple of weeks earlier. The track team worked out at the opposite end from the baseball diamond, several Mike Schmidt home runs away.

  Track practice seemed to be a pretty haphazard affair. I saw no one who looked like a coach. Three boys were jogging slowly around the outside of the quarter-mile cinder track. The way their hands were moving, I could tell they were intent on the stories they were telling each other. On the far side of the track two girls were working on the hurdles. There was a pole vaulting pit, a broad jump pit, and an area where half a dozen large boys and a couple of slim girls, all dressed in shorts and little sleeveless singlets, were taking turns putting the shot.

  I approached a very skinny boy who was sitting on the grass at the edge of the track. He had one leg stretched straight in front of him, the other straight back, and he was bending forward and reaching for his toes with his fingers, bowing his head so that his chin touched his thigh. Marvelously limber. He was grunting, and the perspiration shone on his shoulders and the back of his neck.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Just a sec,” the boy panted. He bobbed his head a couple of times, then reversed the direction of his legs and repeated the process. Then he stood, legs spread, hands on hips, and bent sideways, left, then right, then left again.

  “Okay,” he said. He picked up the sweatshirt that was lying beside him and toweled his face and arms with it. “You want me?”

  “Not unless you’re Harvey Willard.”

  The boy lifted his eyebrows. “That’s not even close. Nobody ever called me The Beast.”

  “That what they call Willard?”

  The boy smiled. He seemed very young, his smile very genuine. “That’s what the newspapers are calling him. The girls, too. It fits. Anyway, he’s over there.”

  The boy pointed across the track to where I could see a cluster of young people talking to a giant of a kid. Then the large boy began running. He held a javelin cocked behind his right ear. When he released it, the balanced spear sailed in a majestic arc, landing far from where the young man hopped in his follow-through.

  “That’s Willard,” said the skinny boy. “Throwing the jav.”

  “He’s got a good arm.”

  The kid looked at me as if I were crazy. “He’s like six inches from the state record. Pretty good arm. Where you from, anyway?”

  “Yale,” I said.

  “Want me to tell him you’re here?”

  “Thanks.”

  The boy loped away around the track, toward the group admiring Harvey Willard’s arm. I watched him as he spoke to Harvey, pointing in my direction as he talked. Then Harvey shrugged, picked up a sweatshirt from the ground, tossed it around his shoulders, and began to walk toward me. He took his time.

  When he stood before me I understood why the sports writers called him The Beast. He was three or four inches taller than my six feet, and I estimated he weighed about two twenty-five, most of it massed in his shoulders and chest. The big-time football folks would bulk him up quickly, with weights and diet. He’d play at two hundred forty and not look too much different.

  He greeted me with a big, practiced grin and an out-thrust snowshoe of a hand. He had been trained in the look-’em-in-the-eye-and-shake-firmly school. I returned his stare and answered his grip with a hard squeeze of my own.

  “I’m Willard,” he said.

  “I’m Coyne.”

  “Yale, huh?” He looked me up and down.

  I noticed that he had a little Band-Aid over his right eyebrow, and the top lid of his eye bore the greenish-yellow tint of a week-old shiner.

  “Yes. Yale.”

  His grin was really likeable. “I’m not Ivy League material, Mr. Coyne. Guy from Princeton told me that. I believe him. I don’t want to waste your time. I might major in business administration, something like that, but I’m not interested in killing myself, if you know what I mean. Hell, I’ll bet Yale doesn’t even have a P.E. major.” He smiled broadly to let me know he was joking.

  I returned his smile. “I doubt it. Couldn’t tell you for sure. I’m not a scout. I’m an attorney.”

  Willard cocked his head. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I represent the estate of your former teacher, George Gresham. Trying to clear up some things about his death. I hoped you might answer a couple of questions for me.”

  “Me? What do I know about it?”

  “Well, he was your teacher. And I found a copy of a paper you wrote for him among his things. It occurred to me that he must have thought highly of your work to save it. You see, we’re very interested in understanding Mr. Gresham’s frame of mind at the time of his death. I thought you might be able to help.”

  I pulled Harvey’s paper from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to him. He took it and glanced at it.

  “Oh, yeah. That stupid paper. So what about it?”

  “Why would your teacher make a copy of it and keep it?”

  “I didn’t know that he did. I got a lousy C on it.”

  “This is your paper, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.” He handed it back to me. “I was working on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rewriting it. Like he said. Fixing up the spelling. Stuff like that.”

  “What about the research? His comment here seems to suggest that you need to document your thesis better.”

  Harvey reached for the paper and frowned at George Gresham’s comment on the front.

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I really don’t have time for that. But I was working on it.”

  “I see,” I said. “Mr. Gresham had a lot of books in his room that seemed to deal with the same subject as your paper. I thought perhaps you were working with him on it.”

  Harvey wiped his forehead with his sweatshirt. He had enormous forearms. “Naw,” he said. “I was just going over the words and punctuation and stuff. Nearly had it done when he killed himself. Now I don’t know what to do with it, and I got that damn C, and I’ve got to get better than a C. Duke says if I don’t get better than a C in history I might have to go to prep school for a year. That means I’d be twenty-three before I got drafted, and that would cost me when I signed.” He peered earnestly at me. “Know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said. The boy had it all figured out.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “that’s what that paper is all about. Can’t tell you why he kept it. One thing’s for sure. It wasn’t because I was his favorite student.”

  “He didn’t like you?”

  “Mister,” he said, “he hated me. Anyone can tell you that. I’m sorry he killed himself and all, but Mr. Gresham, he had it in for me. Ask anybody. He insulted me right in class.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. Called me The Beast of Little Brain. You think that was called for?”

  I smiled at George’s Winnie-the-Pooh allusion. “Doesn’t sound called for to me,” I said.

  “Aw, he was all right, I guess. He just took history too seriously, that’s all. See, and now I’ve got this paper, and some new guy’s taking over Mr. Gresham’s classes, and I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, I really do need to get that grade up”

  “Why don’t you explain it to the new guy? Give him your revision.”

  “Yeah,” Harvey said doubtfully
. “The thing is, I really need some help on it. Muffy would help me, only she…”

  “Muffy?”

  “My girl. Maybe my girl.” Harvey laughed and pointed to his eye. “Muffy’s a popular kid. I had this fight the other day. Kid was bothering her, so I laid him out.”

  “He got in a good lick, looks like,” I said.

  Harvey glowered at me. “You should have seen him. Anyway, turns out Muffy wanted to be bothered. That make any sense to you?”

  “Women hardly ever make sense to me,” I said.

  Harvey smiled. “Right. So anyway, right now Muffy isn’t speaking to me, and I doubt if she’ll help me with my paper.”

  “Why not talk to your English teacher about it?”

  He shrugged. I persisted. “Worth a try, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a frown. “I guess.”

  I looked at his paper again. “What do all these marks mean?” He stood close to me and looked over my shoulder. “Like this. ‘Ag.’ What’s ‘Ag’ mean?”

  “Agreement,” he said. “That means agreement. See, my sentence goes, ‘None of the women’s bodies were positively identified.’ The verb should be ‘was’ there. ‘None was.’ That’s agreement.” He looked at me. “Right?”

  I shrugged. “Sounds good to me. What about this? ‘Ro.’ What’s that?”

  “Run-on. A run-on sentence. Needs a period in the middle.” Harvey looked at me. “See, I do know this stuff. I just need a little help. Maybe I will talk to my English teacher. That’s not a bad idea.”

  I flipped through his paper. Gresham’s interest in it still baffled me. “So, then, ‘Sp’ here means spelling. And ‘P’—what’s that? Punctuation?”

  “Right. Lots of those little buggers, huh?”

  “Seem to be,” I nodded. Something on the page caught my eye that I hadn’t noticed before. There was an “SP” notation beside a name that George had drawn a circle around. “What about this?” I said. Harvey leaned over my shoulder to look.

  “Right. That’s spelling. When he writes it all in capitals and draws a circle around it, I guess that means he’s really mad about it. Dumb to misspell someone’s name, I suppose. See, that’s Carla Steinholtz, one of the women who was bombing post offices and stuff back there in the sixties. Real dumb, to misspell a name. I must’ve copied it wrong. It’s probably ‘ie’ or got no ‘t’ in it or something.”

  Harvey backed a step or two away from me and began jogging in place and rolling his bulky shoulders like a prize fighter waiting for the bell to sound. I figured I’d worn out my welcome with him.

  “Look, Harvey. I appreciate your time.”

  “Hey, no sweat, Mr. Coyne. Always a pleasure talking with someone from the Ivies. Sorry I couldn’t help you out with Mr. Gresham, there. And real sorry about Yale. I’m pretty well set at Duke.”

  I smiled. “That’s okay. I understand. And I did think your paper was interesting. You ought to work on it some more. Really.”

  He toweled his hair with his balled-up sweatshirt. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably should. Probably won’t, though, to tell the truth. I don’t know. Maybe Muffy will come around. You know how women are.”

  “Sure. I know how they are.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t fix up those dumb mistakes, at least.”

  “Do that.” I pointed to his eye. “And you watch out, now, when you go around defending the honor of maidens in distress.”

  He frowned and threw his sweatshirt over his shoulders. We began walking across the field. “That asshole Spender doesn’t scare me with all his guns and stuff,” he said.

  “Who?”

  Harvey was rolling his shoulders as he walked. “Cap Spender. Who’s been messing with Muffy. Just a jerk who goes to school here. Shaves his head, wears old Army clothes. A weirdo. Talks about guns and killing black people and Jews and—like that. You know?”

  “I think I met him,” I said. “What’d you mean about his guns?”

  Harvey tossed his head. “Aw, some of the kids say he keeps guns in his room. I dunno. One kid tried to tell me that Spender showed him some kind of little machine gun that he kept in his closet. I mean, Spender’s crazy, but, Jesus—a machine gun? I think he tells stories is all. Though this same kid was telling me that he knows for a fact that Spender belongs to some kind of military club or something, and that he sneaks off campus a lot to go to meetings. Said he saw Spender getting into a car with Vermont plates one night after supper a couple weeks ago.” Harvey shrugged his big shoulders. “Just a weirdo, if you ask me.”

  “Cap Spender,” I said. “What kind of a name is that?”

  “Means captain, I guess. Like, he’s trying to organize these kids here at the school. He’s their captain. Some kind of military outfit or something. He shows them his guns and makes them read this fascist stuff and call him ‘sir.’ Shit! I don’t know what Muffy sees in that freak.”

  “Me neither,” I said with a smile.

  Suddenly from behind us came a sharp, piercing cry which stopped Harvey and me in our tracks. It was the shout a black belt makes before he slices through a cement block with the side of his hand. “Hi-yah!”

  I quickly turned. About fifty yards from us, five or six young men were racing erratically across the grass. They were grouped together as they darted from side to side, paused, skipped backwards, then sprinted forward. The object of their quick movements, I saw, was a soccer ball. It was being controlled by a boy who was clad in a tee shirt and shorts like the others, but was distinguished by the bright red bandanna he had tied across his forehead.

  Harvey and I stopped to watch. The boy with the headband was being chased by the other boys, who appeared intent on taking the ball from him. They were having no luck at all. He tapped the ball from foot to foot as he darted and dodged among them. Then he stopped and flipped the ball up over his head. He feinted with his head, and at the same time managed to cradle the ball with his heel behind him. Then he whirled around and sped off in the opposite direction, leaving the others several steps behind him. As they sprinted to catch up, the boy with the headband raced full speed, all the while dribbling the soccer ball without allowing it to touch the ground. With his toe he nudged it to his opposite instep, then up to his knee, opposite thigh, chest, head, tap-tap-tap on his forehead. Then he dropped it to his foot again without pausing or altering his headlong stride. He reminded me of Bob Cousy bringing the ball down-court on a Celtics fast break, zipping through the entire Knicks team. The ball stayed at his feet as if it were tethered there with a big elastic. It obeyed his will as if his mind, not his body, controlled it. He stopped to let the others catch up, so he could tease them some more. They kicked at the darting ball. They dived at it with their feet. They tried to bump the boy with the red bandanna with their hips, but he pivoted and pirouetted away from them gracefully.

  Then he gave the ball a tremendous kick, again screaming “Hi-yah!” with the effort. The soccer ball shot upward, higher than I would have thought possible. It paused at its peak, a dot against the sky, then plummeted. All of the boys circled under it. But the one with the red bandanna somehow caught it with his thigh. He faked with his shoulders, whirled, dropped the ball to the ground, and kicked it again, this time straight ahead of him. The ball took off on a high, majestic arc and landed far from the boys. Then they all fell to the ground and I could hear their laughter, although by now they were more than a football field away from me and Harvey.

  “Wow!” I said to Harvey.

  “He’s pretty good, huh?”

  “Some foot on that kid.”

  “That’s Mr. Binh,” said Harvey with a grin.

  “Alexander Binh? The Dean?”

  “Yep. He helps out with the soccer team in the fall.”

  “I thought it was one of the students.”

  “Nope. That’s Mr. Binh. He keeps in good shape. Real good shape.”

  I nodded. “I’ll say.”

  Harvey glanced over his shoulder, then turned
and shoved his big mitt at me. “I really gotta get back to practice, Mr. Coyne. A pleasure to have conversed with you, sir.”

  I took his big paw. “My pleasure, Mr. Willard. I appreciate your time.”

  He turned and ambled back to the javelin-tossing area. He seemed a gentle enough Beast.

  CHAPTER 8

  WASHINGTON WAS HOT AND humid, and I was happy to be able to get all my work done in one day there. I phoned the office Friday morning to tell Julie I’d be in after lunch, then spent the morning scribbling out my report for Frank.

  He was going to be disappointed. A firm I had never heard of in Louisiana had been granted a patent on a process for manufacturing coffee bags. I learned that they had already begun to market them, so I wrote to the company for samples. I suggested in my report to Frank that the idea of the coffee bag was unprotected, of course, and that there was therefore nothing legal standing in the way of his developing his own manufacturing process. But I knew Frank Paradise well enough to predict that he would never pursue it. If it wasn’t his invention, he wasn’t interested.

  I wrote longhand on yellow legal pads, sitting at the pine trestle table at the end of my dining-living room overlooking the harbor. Sometimes I glanced out over the bay. It was the same ocean that George Gresham had jumped into, I realized at one point. The idea, for some reason, startled me.

  My mind kept turning to George.

  I finished my draft of Frank’s report about noontime, showered, and pulled on slacks and a short-sleeved knit shirt. Then I called Julie again.

  “Brady L. Coyne, Attorney,” she answered.

  “Hi. Me.”

  “You coming in, or what?”

  “Just to drop off the Paradise report. I don’t want to see anybody. No appointments, please. Any calls?”

  “Mrs. DeVincent was all. She wants to know about the dogs.”

  “Still?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “Me? You’re the lawyer. I told her you’d call.”

  I sighed. “Okay. That it?”