A Fine Line (7 page)

“That’s one of the reasons I’m calling,” I said. “I was wondering if you’ve talked to Ethan in the past twenty-four hours or so.”

“Me?” She blew out a breath. “I don’t hear much from my son anymore. Since he went off to college and began living with Walter.” She paused. “Wait a minute. Why are you asking me about Ethan? Where is he? Is he all right?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that he wasn’t
there when Walt had his accident, and I’m trying to get ahold of him to tell him what happened.”

“But he lives there,” she said.

“He apparently stayed somewhere else last night. I thought maybe he was with you.”

“Now you’re upsetting me, Mr. Coyne. Where is my boy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you should talk with him before I do, please ask him to call me.”

“I will,” she said. “You do the same.”

“Of course.”

“The police might come around looking for Ethan,” I said.

“The police,” she said. “Why?”

“Nobody saw it happen, that’s all,” I said. “It was what they call an unattended death. They’re obliged to investigate.”

“And they think Ethan . . . ?”

“It’s just their routine,” I said.

“Routine,” she said. “Of course.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Mr. Coyne?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think something has happened to Ethan?”

“No,” I said. “I think he’s a college kid who was at a party or something and ended up spending the night with friends, the way college kids do. I just wanted to tell him what happened to his father before he read about it in the papers.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’m sure you’re right.” She cleared her throat. “I am sad about Walter. He wasn’t much of a husband. Or a father, for that matter. But he was a good man.”

“I agree with you on all counts,” I said.

After I hung up with Ellen Bramhall, I reached down and gave Henry a pat. He opened his eyes and looked at me for
a moment, and when he decided I didn’t have something for him to eat, he sighed and went back to sleep.

Julie returned around one-thirty. She brought a large plastic bag into my office and put it on my desk.

“What’s this?” I said.

“It’s not for you.”

I peeked inside. The bag held a small green sack of lams dry dog food, four cans of Alpo, two aluminum bowls, and a leash.

I took out the leash. It was one of those retractable gizmos with a square handle. “Thank you,” I said to Julie. “We’ll have a lot of fun with this.”

“Maybe he’s hungry,” she said.

Henry was sitting there watching us. His ears perked up at the word “hungry.”

“I bet he is,” I said.

So I spread an old newspaper on the floor in my office and put half a can of Alpo and a handful of Iams and a splash of water into a bowl. I filled the other bowl with water.

Henry sat there looking at the bowls. “For you,” I told him.

He cocked his head.

“Okay,” I said.

He leaped up and went at it.

Julie had also stopped at the deli for tuna sandwiches with lettuce, tomatoes, and onions on wheat bread, bags of chips, dill pickles, and cans of Coke. Regular for me, Diet for her.

We ate at my conference table while Henry, having burped a couple of times, lay down beside me. His chin rested on his paws and his eyes followed my hands as I moved food into my mouth.

I tried to convince Julie that the house in the suburbs she
shared with Megan and Edward, her husband, would be a perfect place for an orphaned Brittany spaniel.

She still wasn’t buying it.

“So what am I supposed to do with him?” I said.

“You rescued him,” she said. “That makes his life your responsibility. Old Chinese saying. Confucius, I think.”

“Confucius say,” I said, “woman who fly upside-down in airplane—”

“Don’t start,” she said quickly. “I hate those stupid adolescent Confucius-say jokes of yours.”

“Sorry,” I said. “About the dog . . .”

Julie stood, gathered up the bags and cans and waxed paper from our lunches, and tossed it all into the waste basket. “Caring for stray dogs is not in my job description,” she said. “And it’s not negotiable.”

“If I didn’t know you better,” I said, “I’d think you didn’t want Henry to have a loving home.”

She snorted a laugh out her nose, turned, and headed for the door.

“I’m leaving the office early,” I said. “We’ve got no appointments. Why don’t you take off for the afternoon?”

She turned and frowned at me. “I don’t care if you double my salary,” she said. “I’m still not taking the dog.”

“He’s really a sweet dog,” I said.

“Yes, he seems to be. You two are destined for each other.”

“No, huh?”

“No.”

I flapped my hand. “Take the afternoon anyway.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I believe I will.”

After Julie left, I made sure Henry’s water dish was full and locked him in the office. If he made a mess, the cleaners who came in at night would just have to take care of it.

It was a fifteen-minute walk to the Emerson College registrar’s office on Tremont Street. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and got the attention of a pretty young woman behind the long counter.

“Help you?” she said.

“Are you the registrar?” I said.

“Me?” She smiled. “Not hardly.”

I took out a business card and put it on the counter. “I need to talk to the registrar.”

She peered at the card, then looked up at me. “A lawyer, huh?”

I nodded.

“Did somebody do something wrong?”

“Yes,” I said.

She cocked her head at me, then smiled. “Well, it wasn’t me. Hang on.”

A minute later a fortyish man in horn-rimmed glasses came to the counter. He had my card in his hand. “Mr. Coyne?”

I nodded.

“I’m James Connors. I’m the registrar here. Were you threatening Jamie?”

“Nope. I wasn’t threatening anybody. I need your help.”

“What kind of help?”

“The father of one of your students died last night. I need to get ahold of the boy.”

“That’s a shame.” James Connors shook his head. “Classes ended nearly a month ago. The students have all gone home.”

“I know where he lives,” I said. “He’s not there. I thought
maybe I could look up his friends, see if they might be able to help.”

“Who’s the student?”

“Ethan Duffy. He’s studying screenwriting.”

“WLP,” he said. “Writing, literature, and publishing. That would be his department. Hang on.”

He disappeared around the corner. I waited about five minutes, and then he came back with a computer printout. “This is the class roster for his freshman screenwriting seminar. My best guess would be that he’d have friends in this class. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know how to help you.”

I looked at the printout. There were sixteen names on it, including Ethan’s. “You wouldn’t have phone numbers for these kids, would you?”

He reached under the counter, pulled out a thin paperback book, and slid it toward me. On the cover it said, “Emerson College Directory.”

“No hometown numbers in there,” he said. “Many of the students have apartments here in Boston. Some stay in the city for the summer. Others hang around for a while after classes end. I imagine a lot of them have gone home, but I’m not comfortable giving you their family information.”

“This is a big help,” I said. “I assume Ethan’s somewhere in the city, probably staying with one of his friends. Thank you.

Henry was glad to see me. I scooched down on the floor, and he leapt upon me, braced his front paws on my shoulders, and licked my face.

I let him do that for a while. Then I stood up and went
to my desk. Henry looked at me for a minute, then came over and curled up under my feet.

I tried the number of every student in Ethan’s freshman screenwriting seminar, starting at the top of the list James Connors had given me. I left messages on the five voicemails that answered, saying the same thing: I was Ethan Duffy’s family friend, I had important news for him, if you see him please have him call me, or if you know where he is, call me yourself. I left my name and phone number.

Seven of the phones had been disconnected.

Three students answered, two boys and a girl. All of them knew Ethan, but none of them admitted to being his friend. They all volunteered that he seemed to be a good guy but kind of a loner, and they had no idea where he might be.

I asked them to have Ethan call me if they happened to run into him. They said they would, but they didn’t expect to run into him.

After I hung up from the last call, I pushed myself back from my desk, lit a cigarette, and stared out the window.

Ethan. Where the hell are you?

I hauled out my big Boston-Cambridge Yellow Pages and looked up Vintage Vinyl. I picked up the phone, then put it down and glanced at my watch. It was a little after four.

“Hey, Henry,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I turned off the electric coffeemaker, rinsed out the pot, snapped on Henry’s leash, picked up the sweatshirt he’d been lying on, and went across the street to the parking garage. I spread my sweatshirt on the backseat and told Henry that was his place. He hopped in, sat on the sweatshirt, and pressed his nose against the window.

I hooked onto Mass. Ave. and crossed the Charles River
on the Harvard Bridge. It was another glorious June day, and the river was dotted with sailboats and one-man sculls and kayaks and canoes. I spotted a couple of bass boats with men chucking spinning lures toward the banks. Seeing them reminded me that I hadn’t been fishing in a couple of weeks. I’d give Charlie McDevitt a call, see if he could free himself up for a day over the weekend.

I needed to go fishing. Fishing, I’d discovered over the years, was an excellent antidote to the bleakness I always felt when somebody I knew died.

Vintage Vinyl, the record shop where Ethan worked, was on Mass. Ave., and I spotted it on the left outside of Central Square just past City Hall. Finding a place to leave my car was a greater challenge.

I finally slid into an empty space on a side street. I hooked Henry to his leash, locked the car, and the two of us strolled over to the record store.

The storefront was just wide enough for a door and a display window. A hand-painted sign in the window read: “Old LP’s and 45’s Bought and Sold.” A dozen or so album covers sandwiched in protective plastic covers were on display—Frank Sinatra, looking boyish and skinny the way he did in
From Here to Eternity
, Nat King Cole holding a cigarette,
Cheap Thrills
, the Janis Joplin breakout with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Johnny Mathis, the Beatles’ White Album. I wondered if record album collectors valued the sleeves the way bibliophiles prized mint-condition book jackets. I was willing to bet that they didn’t actually play the records.

Henry and I went inside. Joan Baez was singing “Baby Blue” over the speakers. Both walls were lined with shelves
packed with record albums, and a long narrow table stood in the middle. It held boxes of 45’s.

A pale, lanky man with a receding hairline and a ponytail and rimless glasses was sitting at an ancient rolltop desk in the corner beside the door. He was talking on the telephone, and when he spotted me, he held up a finger.

I riffled through the 45’s. “Oh Gee” by the Crows. Vintage 1953. “Come Go with Me,” the Del Vikings. A couple of years later, I seemed to recall. Before I was even born.

The guy at the desk hung up and came over. Up close I saw that he was younger than I’d thought. Thirty, maybe.

When he noticed Henry, he scooched down and rubbed the dog’s head. “It’s old Henry. How you doin’, man?”

Henry lay down and rolled onto his back.

The guy looked up at me and grinned. “He loves to have his belly scratched. You must be a friend of Ethan’s, huh?”

I nodded and held out my hand. “Brady Coyne.”

He shook my hand. “I’m Phil,” he said. “So how come you got Henry? Ethan brings this mutt to work with him sometimes. Nice dog. Knows how to behave. Customers like him.”

“Are you the owner?” I said.

“Of this place?” He rolled his eyes. “Nah. Not me. I couldn’t afford it. We don’t make any money here. Conrad, the guy who owns it, he collects this stuff. I think the store is some kind of tax thing. We get a dozen people in here in a day, we’ve had a good day, and most of ’em don’t buy anything. Conrad sells some stuff on the Internet, I guess. Mainly, this is his collection. You lookin’ for something?”

“I was hoping to catch Ethan,” I said. “Return Henry to him.”

“Ethan works nights,” said Phil. “Comes on at six.”

“Is he scheduled to be here tonight?”

“Not tonight.” He shrugged. “He was supposed to be here last night, but he never showed up.”

“No?” I said. “What happened?”

“Well, shit, man, I don’t know what happened. He just didn’t show up. I was here. I can’t leave ’til Ethan gets here, you know? I waited ’til close to seven, and no Ethan. So I called Conrad—that’s the owner, Conrad Henshall—and finally he came in so I could go home.”

“Does this happen a lot?”

“What, Ethan not showing up?”

I nodded.