Close to the Bone (23 page)

But she wasn’t there. The red light on my answering machine glowed steadily. She hadn’t called, either.

Around eleven the next morning, Julie buzzed me. “Mr. McDevitt on line two,” she said.

I pushed the blinking button. “What’s up, Charlie?”

“Eddie Vaccaro,” he said.

“What about him?”

“My guys found him.”

“Well, good. The state police are looking for him, too.”

“They already know,” he said. “He was propped up in the backseat of a ninety-three Buick Skylark in the parking garage at Logan. There was one bullet hole in his left eye and another behind his right ear.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“Shit, indeed,” said Charlie.

O
N WEDNESDAY MORNING I
sat in a conference room in the federal office building in Government Center with Charlie and two of his fellow prosecutors, one male and one female, and talked into a tape recorder. I told them what Eddie Vaccaro had told me as well as I could remember it—that he believed his boss, Vincent Russo, had a contract out on him, that the hit man was terrified that he was going to get hit himself, that he was prepared to give testimony against Russo in exchange for immunity and a slot in the witness protection program, and that he trusted only Paul Cizek to negotiate it for him. I told them what I had told Vaccaro—that I didn’t know where Paul was, that as far as I knew he’d gone overboard and drowned, and that he should retain another lawyer.

I told them about having a gun stuck in my eye in my parking garage.

I told Charlie and his friends that a week after my session with Vaccaro I had found Paul Cizek living in a cabin on a pond in New Hampshire and that I told Paul that Vaccaro was looking for him.

A few days later Paul Cizek was murdered. “And now Vaccaro’s dead,” I said.

“Cizek was murdered Monday, right?” said Charlie.

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” said Charlie. “That’s it.” He gestured to the young man and young woman who had been sitting with us. “Leave us alone for a few minutes.”

After they turned off the tape recorder and left the office, Charlie leaned toward me. “They found Vaccaro’s body early yesterday morning,” he said. “Tuesday. The ME tells us he’d been dead between twenty-four and thirty-six hours.”

“That would be—”

“Sunday night sometime.”

“About the time I got a gun in my eye in my parking garage.”

Charlie nodded.

“Which means—”

“It means Vaccaro died before Cizek, for one thing,” he said. “So he couldn’t’ve killed him.”

“It also means he might’ve been dead when that gorilla was asking me where he was.”

“Yep,” said Charlie.

Vaccaro’s body, said Charlie, had been noticed by a young couple returning from a vacation in Portugal. The Buick Skylark was parked beside their Honda in a dark corner of the third level of the airport parking garage.

Cause of death had been one of the two .22-caliber hollow-point slugs fired from close range into his brain—one through the left eye, the other through his skull, just behind his right ear.

“That was Vaccaro’s trademark, of course,” Charlie told me. “The left eye and behind the right ear. The eye was always the first one. When Vaccaro killed a man, it was always with a message from Vinny Russo, the man who paid him. Eddie wanted his victims to see exactly what was happening to them. Make sure they got Vinny’s message. So he gave them a bullet in the eye. Whoever hit Vaccaro was obviously delivering a message, too.”

The Skylark was registered to Vaccaro’s wife, whose name was Marie and who lived in Maiden. The steering wheel, door handles, dashboard, and vinyl upholstery had been wiped free of fingerprints, although the technicians had found some partials on the frame that matched Vaccaro’s and some smudges that might’ve belonged to somebody else.

There were bloodstains on the backseat where the body had been lying, but they found no skull fragments or brain tissue in the car, suggesting that the actual shooting had happened somewhere else.

They found no murder weapon, no note, no matchbook or cigar butt or lost wallet in the car. No clues at all, obvious or microscopic.

“The absence of clues,” said Charlie, “being an important clue, of course.”

“A professional hit,” I said.

“So it appears.”

“That’s what he was afraid of,” I said, “and that’s what happened.”

“And there goes Vinny Russo,” said Charlie. “Down the tubes. And now we’ve got to try to find the guy who hit Vaccaro, and we’ll offer him immunity, and see if we can’t get him to give us Vincent Russo. Uncle Vinny knows this, of course. So he’ll hire someone to hit the hit man before we catch up with him, and so it goes, round and round. Next time a professional killer shows up in your office, why not have Julie give me a call, huh?”

“I doubt if it’ll happen again,” I said.

Alex wasn’t there when I got home that afternoon. I hadn’t expected she would be. I changed into jeans and sat on my balcony. I smoked and stared at the sky. I thought of Eddie Vaccaro and Glen Falconer—one dead, the other close to it. And I thought of Paul, of course. He was dead, too.

I thought of Vinny Russo sending his henchmen out to find and kill a man who might’ve already been dead.

My mind kept switching back to Alex. I contemplated the ephemeral nature of youth and happiness and love and life itself.

Images of Alex kept transforming into Olivia and Maddy Wilkins. Paul had apparently been screwing Maddy. If so, Olivia must have suspected. She couldn’t have missed seeing the evidence in the drawer of Paul’s bedside table when she retrieved his car key and again when she put it back.

Where did Thomas Gall fit into this equation? A sad, grieving, perhaps desperate man. But a murderer?

Eddie Vaccaro, of course, was a murderer. But he died first. So he couldn’t have killed Paul.

The pink afterglow of the sunset still tinged the sky over the Plum Island marsh as I pulled in behind the yellow Volkswagen with the
JUST SAY YO
bumper sticker.

I mounted the steps of Maddy’s cottage. The inside door was open, and amplified guitar music came at me through the screen door. Jimi Hendrix, if I wasn’t mistaken. I rapped on the door frame and called, “Maddy? Are you there?”

A minute later she appeared on the other side of the screen door. She was holding a can of Diet Coke. She wore a plain blue T-shirt and pink shorts. She squinted at me through the screen. “Hello?” she said uncertainly.

“It’s Brady Coyne,” I said. “Paul Cizek’s lawyer?”

“Oh, sure.” She pushed the screen door open. “Come on in.”

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “Can you come outside?”

She glanced over her shoulder, then turned back to me and said, “I guess so. Want a Coke or something?”

“No, thank you.”

She came out and we sat on the front steps. “What’s up?” she said.

“I want to ask you a couple of things, Maddy. It’s very important that you tell me the truth.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “Like a cross-examination, huh?”

“Yes. It’s actually possible that the questions I ask you could be asked of you in court, under oath.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

I flapped my hands and shrugged.

“Are you trying to scare me?”

“No. I just want you to tell me the truth.”

She hugged herself. “You
are
scaring me. What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain,” I said. “First, I want you to remember everything you can about the man with the black beard who we saw the first day I was here. You know who I mean?”

She nodded. “I already told you everything. He was at Paul’s place a couple of times. I saw them one night talking out on his deck.” She shrugged.

“Did you hear what they were saying?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“It could be very important. Please try.”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Then she opened them and looked at me. “Well…”

“Yes?”

“I wasn’t spying on them.”

“I know, Maddy. I’m not accusing you of that. What did you hear?”

“I didn’t realize that other man was there when I went over. I didn’t mean to sneak around, but I was barefoot, and it was dark, and I guess they didn’t know I was there. I heard voices out on his deck, so I went around the side of the house, and when I saw that Paul was with somebody I stopped so they wouldn’t see me. Paul was… he said something like ‘Play it my way’ to that man. And the man kind of nodded, and Paul said, ‘Trust me.’ ”

“Are you sure that’s what he said? ‘Play it my way’?”

She nodded. “Maybe not those exact words. But something like that, because I remember wondering what they were planning to do. I do remember him saying ‘trust me.’ It struck me as pretty strange.”

“What else, Maddy? Did either of them say anything else?”

She looked at me and shook her head. “Nothing. I left. It was obviously a private conversation.”

“Did Paul ever mention that man to you?”

“No. Never.”

“And you didn’t say anything to him about seeing them together?”

“Oh, no.”

“Can you remember anything else?”

“Not really. I hung around by the end of Paul’s street, waiting for the man to leave, and after awhile the two of them came out and walked to where the man’s truck was parked. They shook hands and then the man drove off and Paul went back to his place.”

“They shook hands.”

“Uh-huh.”

I paused to light a cigarette. Then I said, “Okay, Maddy. Just one more question, okay?”

“I still don’t understand—”

“I’ll explain, I promise. First, I want you to tell me about you and Paul.”

“What about us?”

“Were you lovers? Were you sleeping with him?”

She let out a long breath that could have been either a laugh or a sigh. “Is that a crime?” she asked softly.

“No,” I said. “But lying about it might be.”

She was shaking her head. “I liked to pretend,” she whispered. “I had such a wicked crush on him. I told my friends that I was sleeping with him, that he loved me, that he’d promised to marry me as soon as he got his divorce. Half the time I believed it myself. He was so nice to me, it was easy to think he really loved me. I wanted to take care of him. I wanted to hold him and kiss him and make him happy. He was so sad and tense all the time. I
knew
I could make him feel better.” She turned to me, and I could see tears glittering in her eyes. “You know what I mean?”

I nodded. “I know about love, yes,” I said. “Are you saying that you and Paul never slept together?”

“Not even close,” she said softly. “He treated me like a daughter, not a lover. He took me on his boat a couple of times. He let me cook for him. He liked to talk to me about my future and my career and stuff like that. One time he kissed me on the top of my head. That was the closest we ever came. I mean, he already had someone anyway. It was stupid of me to—”

“Someone else?”

“Sure.”

“Another woman, you mean?”

She nodded. “She was there a lot. Whenever I saw her car there I’d get this twisted-up feeling in my stomach.”

“Did you ever see this woman?”

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled quickly. “I—I kinda spied on them a couple times.”

“What did she look like?”

“She dressed rich. You can tell expensive stuff, even if it’s just a skirt and a blouse or something. She seemed very sophisticated, and she was beautiful. Tall, thin, blond. It made me sad, you know? Next to her, who was I? I knew I could never compete with a classy lady like that.”

“Her car was parked there, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what the car looked like?”

“Sure. It was a really neat little white sports car. A two-seater. A Mercedes convertible.”

M
ADDY,” I SAID, “I’VE
got to use your telephone.”

“Sure, but—”

“I’ve got to make a call. It’s important.”

She shrugged. “Okay. Come on in.”

Jimi Hendrix had stopped singing, and a young woman was sprawled on the sofa eating yogurt from a cardboard container and reading a magazine. Maddy pointed to the telephone on the wall in the kitchen, then stood there watching me.

“I need privacy, Maddy,” I said.

“Huh? Oh, sure.” She went over and sat with her friend on the sofa.

I glanced at my watch. It was a little after nine. I pecked out the number for Horowitz’s office at state police headquarters. Horowitz wasn’t there. I asked to be patched through to him and apparently managed to make a convincing case for it.

I waited a few minutes, and then Horowitz said, “This better be damn good, Coyne.”

“I think it is,” I said. “Or pretty bad, depending on how you look at it.”

“I don’t need any fucking riddles. What do you want?”

“I want you to tell your counterparts in New Hampshire to fingerprint Paul Cizek’s body.”

“Why?”

“To identify it, of course.”

“Yeah, why else?” He paused. “Wait a minute. That body’s already been ID’d, hasn’t it?”

“Mrs. Cizek identified it, yes.”

“Then—?”

“Lieutenant,” I said, “I could be wrong. If I am, I’m sorry. But if I’m right, then that body doesn’t belong to Paul Cizek.”

“I thought you saw it.”

“I saw a body,” I said. “It was facedown.”

“You mean you never…”

“No.”

He was silent for a moment. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I think you better explain, Coyne.”

“If I’m right, I will. If I’m wrong, you’ll be too mad at me to care.”

“You got that right, pal,” he said. “Okay. I’ll get back to you.”

After Horowitz and I disconnected, I dialed Roger Falconer’s number in Lincoln. Brenda answered.

“It’s Brady Coyne,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“I think it would be better in person.”

She hesitated. “When?”

“As soon as possible. It’ll take me at least an hour to get there. Make it ten-thirty.”

“What’s this all about, anyway?”

“You and Paul Cizek.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Yes. All right.” She paused. “I don’t think you should come here.”