Close to the Bone (2 page)

“You can’t take care of this,” I said.

Roger shook his head. “We need a good lawyer.”

“You need a miracle.”

Glen leaned toward me. “Listen, Brady—”

“Shut up,” said Roger conversationally. “Brady’s right, and if it weren’t our family’s name that the newspapers will be plastering all over the front page, I’d leave you out there twisting in the wind.” He turned to me. “Do you know any miracle workers?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Who?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“I’d rather—”

“Do you want me to handle it, Roger?”

“I do.”

“Good. I will handle it.” I drained my Coke and stood up. “That’s it, then. I’ll be in touch with you.”

Roger looked up at me. “Brady,” he said, “it’s—”

“I know. A matter of utmost gravity. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He pushed himself out of his chair. Glen started to stand, but Roger said, “I’ll see Brady out,” and Glen sat down again.

I held out my hand to Glen. “Good luck,” I said.

He shrugged and we shook. “Thanks.”

Roger followed me back through the living room to the front door. I didn’t see Brenda. I put my coat on and opened the door. “He doesn’t seem that contrite,” I said.

“My son is an alcoholic,” said Roger, as if that explained everything.

“It’s hard to be sympathetic.”

Roger nodded. “He’s looking at prison time, isn’t he?”

“Sounds like it.”

“How much?”

“Not enough,” I said.

A
LEXANDRIA SHAW WAS WAITING
for me when I got to my apartment a little after seven-thirty. Her feet were bare and she was wearing a pair of my sweatpants and one of my raggedy old Yale T-shirts, and she was curled in the corner of the sofa prodding at her scalp with the business end of a pencil and frowning through her big round glasses at a yellow legal pad. My old black-and-white television was tuned to Jeopardy, but Alex didn’t seem to be watching it.

I went over and kissed the back of her neck. “I didn’t have a chance to call,” I said. “I was hoping you’d be here.”

“Gimme a minute, sweetie,” she mumbled.

“Working on a story?”

“Mmm.”

I threw my trench coat over the back of a chair, followed my nose into the kitchen, and lifted the lid off the pot that was simmering on the stove. I took a sniff, then went back into the living room. “Lentils, huh?” I said.

She looked up, poked her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, and smiled. “Lentils are very good for you.”

“You don’t mind if I add some hot sausages, do you?”

“Hot sausages taste good,” she said. “An unbeatable combination, lentils and sausages. Something that tastes good to neutralize something that’s good for you. I brought garlic bread and salad stuff, too, if you want to throw it together.”

In the refrigerator there were half a dozen Italian sausages that I had grilled a couple of days earlier. I cut them into bite-sized chunks and added them to Alex’s lentil soup. I tossed a green salad in a wooden bowl and put the loaf of garlic bread into the oven and set it for “warm.” Then I poured two fingers of Rebel Yell over a glass of ice cubes. I took the glass into the bedroom, where I climbed out of my suit and into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt.

When I returned to the living room, Alex was sipping from a bottle of Samuel Adams lager and watching the television. I paused in the doorway and gazed at her sprawled on my sofa, dressed in my baggy old sweatpants, with a pencil stuck over her ear and her glasses slipped down toward the end of her nose. She looked incredibly sexy.

I’d met her in May. Within a few weeks we were exchanging “sleepovers,” and on Labor Day weekend we’d exchanged house keys. During my entire ten years of divorced bachelorhood, I’d never done anything like that.

Oh, we kept our separate apartments—hers on Marlborough Street in Back Bay and mine in the high-rise overlooking Boston Harbor. We did not quite concede that we were living together. But that’s about what it amounted to.

It should have felt strange and stressful to a man who’d been alone for a decade and had conscientiously avoided making any commitments to a woman in that time. But it didn’t. With Alex, it felt natural and logical.

“Macedonia,” she called out suddenly.

“What is
Macedonia,” I corrected. “You’ve got to give the question.”

She nodded without taking her eyes from the television, and a moment later she said, “Carthage!
What is
Carthage, I mean.”

I slumped onto the sofa beside her. She leaned her cheek toward me and I gave her a loud, wet kiss.

“Mmm,” she said. “Nice.”

“How’re you doing?”

“I’ve gotten practically all of them right so far.”

“Good. That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh. Like, how was my day?”

“Like that, yes.”

“Turn that thing off, will you?”

“Gladly.” I reached over and snapped off the television. Then I slumped back on the sofa.

Alex wiggled against me and laid her cheek on my shoulder. “Wanna start again?”

“Sure,” I said. I turned, touched her hair, and kissed her softly on the lips. “How was your day?” I said.

“Good. Fine.” She nuzzled my throat. “Had an interview with the governor. If you think stories about the implications of Massachusetts converting to a graduated state income tax are exciting, I had a helluva day.”

“If anyone can make those stories exciting, you can,” I said.

“Yes, I can,” she said. “How’re you?”

I blew out a long sigh. “It was okay until the end. Sometimes I feel like a goddamn glorified butler for all the self-important old farts who are my clients. I had to drive all the way out to Lincoln at four-thirty for a conversation that would’ve taken ten minutes on the telephone because Roger Falconer doesn’t make office visits and thinks his business is too fucking grave to conduct on the telephone. ‘A matter of the utmost gravity.’ That’s what he called it. So instead of getting home at five-thirty, it’s, what, nearly eight?”

“Almost eight, yes,” she said softly. “I thought you liked your clients.”

I nodded. “Oh, I do. I don’t accept clients I don’t like. But some of them can be pretty damn self-important. Sometimes it gets to me. Whatever happened to the guy who was going to argue civil liberties cases before the Supreme Court?”

“Your career took a different turn, Brady. You do what you do, and you’re very good at it, and you’re your own boss, and it makes you a lot of money. There are worse things.”

I sipped from my drink. “There are better things, too. I mean, Billy’s out there in Idaho, a ski instructor in the winter and a trout fishing guide in the summer and a bartender in his spare time. I’d like to do that.”

“Your son is a twenty-one-year-old college dropout,” she said. “You’re not.”

“No,” I said. “Not even close. There are times I wish I was, though. I’d like to drop out and head for the Rockies, even if I’m not twenty-one.”

Her hand squeezed my leg. “Would you bring me with you?”

“Out West?”

“Yes. Would you come?”

“You bet.”

“Why not do it? Let’s do it, Brady.”

I sighed. This was one of Alex’s favorite conversational topics. “Sure.”

“What’s stopping you?” she persisted. “Billy’s off on his own, Joey’s got that scholarship to Stanford. You’ve fulfilled all your obligations. It’s time to live your own life.”

“My clients—”

“Can’t get along without you. I know.” She snuggled against me. “I’d do it. I really would.”

“You would, huh?”

“Sure. We could buy a little ranch. We’d have horses.”

“And dogs.”

“Yes,” she said. “Dogs. And cats, too, and maybe a goat. And a meadow for some cows, and beyond it a view of the mountains—”

“Don’t forget the trout stream running through the meadow.”

“Right. So I could watch you catch trout while I sat in the hot tub.”

“And afterwards I’d join you in the hot tub, and we could watch the sun set and drink beer.”

“Mmm,” she said. “Nice. Really nice.”

“Could we really do that?”

“Sure,” she mumbled. “Why not?”

“What about your career?”

“You mean,” she said, “what about
your
career?” She blew out a sigh. “Or maybe you mean, what about our relationship? If we did that, you’d never get rid of me.”

“I don’t want to get rid of you.” I nuzzled the back of her neck.

She looked up at me. “No?”

“No. It was nice coming home, sniffing the aroma of lentil soup, and finding you here.”

“It happens a lot that way.”

“And it’s always nice.”

“Well,” she said, “I’d go out West with you. I would. Then I guess I’d be there every day, and maybe you wouldn’t like that so much. You’d get sick of lentil soup.”

“I would like it. Especially if you let me put hot sausages in it.”

“But it won’t happen,” she said. “I understand.”

I laid my head on the back of the sofa and gazed up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think I’m turning into an old fart myself,” I said.

“You’re more like a middle-aged fart,” she said.

“I mean,” I persisted, “you’re right. What’s stopping me? The boys have grown wings and flown away. I’ve had a little career, made some money. My clients don’t need me. There are certainly plenty of lawyers who can do what I do. I hate living in the city. I hate feeling I’ve got to jump when I get a summons from people like Roger Falconer. I could be a bartender.”

“You’d make a lovely bartender,” Alex said.

“Or a trout guide. I could do that.”

“I bet you’d like that,” she said.

I sighed. “It’s fun to think about.”

She sat up, turned, and frowned at me. “You’re stuck, sweetie. You should try to get unstuck. Life is too short.”

“I know.” I pushed myself to my feet. “Let’s eat.”

After supper Alex and I pulled on sweatshirts and sat out on the balcony overlooking the harbor. A misty rain swirled in the wind, and whitecaps glittered in the city lights, but we were protected from most of it by the building and the balcony above us. We sipped coffee and I smoked a cigarette.

“I heard about Glen Falconer’s accident,” she said.

Alex is a reporter for the Globe, and she knows that I must protect the confidentiality of my clients. Some aspects of my business I cannot discuss with anybody, but especially not with a reporter, even if she’s the woman who has a key to my apartment and makes lentil soup for me. So she never asks me questions. Some of the information she gets in her job as a reporter is confidential, too, so I don’t ask her questions, either. Sometimes our conversations are elliptical, and sometimes we have to search for topics we can both talk about freely.

Sometimes we can talk elliptically and still help each other do our jobs.

“What’d you hear?” I asked her.

“He flunked the Breathalyzer. He was driving a big car and he collided with a little Honda. Two people were hurt.”

“One of them died this morning,” I said.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Shit, I hate it when that happens.”

“Me, too.” We were quiet for a couple of minutes, then I said, “What else did you hear?”

“He either rolled through a stop sign or failed to look before he entered an intersection. The Honda had the right of way. He side-swiped her. She swerved into a parked car. Her chest hit the steering column.”

“No seat belt?”

“I guess not. The other passenger was a child in a car seat. Not injured. So they’re charging him, huh?”

“You’ll probably read about it in tomorrow’s Globe,” I said.

“Falconer’s a big name in Boston.”

“Roger’s is.”

“Glen’s got lots of his daddy’s money,” she said. “Ergo, his is a big name, too. This isn’t his first, you know.”

I nodded. Glen’s license had been suspended once before for DUI when he was nailed for speeding on Route 95. He had taken the class required by the Commonwealth for convicted drunk drivers, got his license back, and then apparently resumed his old ways. “In Sweden, I think it is,” I said, “one conviction and you lose your license for life.”

“Sensible people, the Swedes.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it. Out on the harbor a big oil tanker was inching through the chop. “I’m getting chilly,” she whispered. “Almost ready for bed?”

“Definitely.”

“You’re not defending him, are you?”

I laughed. “Not me, babe. Glen needs a magician, not some paper pusher.”

“You’re not a paper pusher, Brady. You’re a fine attorney.”

“Hey,” I said. “I am one helluva paper pusher. You want some paper pushed, see Brady Coyne. Don’t knock paper pushing.”

She squeezed my thigh. “I’m sorry. You are indeed a superior paper pusher, and a noble profession it is. So who’re you getting to defend Glen Falconer?”

“Paul Cizek, if I can persuade him to take the case.”

“Ah,” she said. “The Houdini of the criminal courts.”

“Paul’s the closest thing to a magician I know,” I said. I stood up and held both of my hands down to Alex. “Come on. I’ve got a magic trick I’d like to show you.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING I
left a message with Paul Cizek’s secretary at Tarlin and Overton. He called me back a little before noon. “How’s the mighty fisherman?” he said when Julie connected us.

“Alas,” I said, “yet another season hath ended and I did not wet nearly enough lines to satisfy my lust. And you and I never did spend time together on the water.”

“Too bad, too,” he said. “I found stripers and blues in every creek and estuary and tidal flat on the north shore. I found them in the rips and in the surf and against the rocks and—”

“And you caught them on eels and sandworms and herring and bunker.”

“Do I detect scorn in your tone, Coyne?”

“Scorn? No. I know you fish with nothing but bait. It’s a pretty low-down way to do it, but you—”

“I’m a pretty low-down guy,” said Paul, “not to handicap myself with flimsy fly rods and elegant little handcrafted confections of hair and feather that have no smell to them.
Chacun à son gout,
if you ask me. The fishing was pretty damn good, and you missed it. Now the boat’s in the garage and my gear is stowed away for another dreary New England winter.”