Dead Winter (11 page)

“Is Snooker—Ernest—at home?”

“Nope. Hardly ever is, ’cept at mealtime. I feed the boy good. Three times regular. Eats like an elephant, I don’t mind telling you. Takes all my pension just to feed him. Otherwise he’s off on that bicycle of his, lookin’ for people to pay attention to him. Fact that some of them tease and taunt him don’t seem to matter. He don’t know the difference. Mostly, people are nice enough. The boy just likes company. You look down on the docks. He likes to hang around the boats, talk to the people there. Might find him dangling a handline off the end, tide’s right. Sometimes he’ll bring home some flounder or mackerel, proud as a kitten with a dead mouse. I cook ’em up for us. About what the poor boy’s good for. Bringing home dead fish. Blessed shame.”

Dotty McCarthy had made no move to invite me in. I could hear the murmur of television voices coming from somewhere in the darkened interior of her house. It was becoming disconcerting talking through a screen door.

“Does your nephew stay out late at night?” I asked the woman.

She pushed the door open a crack and snapped the cigarette butt past my ear out into the yard. “Usually,” she said after a hesitation so long that I thought she was going to ignore my question.

“What about Sunday night?”

She frowned. “Today’s what?”

“Tuesday.”

“Let’s see. He was in last night. We watched television some. I went to bed usual time. He stayed up. Agitated, he was. That when he called you up?”

I nodded. “Last night, yes. Late.”

“Okay, then. Sunday.” She bobbed her head up and down. “The night that woman got herself killed, right?”

“Yes.”

“He was out most of the night. Up early the next day, too. Ate breakfast and took right off on his bike.”

He had pedaled straight to Des’s house, I figured, where he was waiting when Marc and I came out.

Dotty McCarthy was leaning back, as if to listen to what was happening on her television. I took the hint and thanked her. I turned to leave.

“Nasty,” she said to my back.

I turned back. “Excuse me?”

“That woman who got killed. Nasty business.”

She stepped back into the darkness. The door closed.

I
PARKED BESIDE A
rusted dumpster in the gravel lot on the opposite side from the silver-shingled shack that was the marina’s office. I noticed a pay phone on the outside wall, the one from which Marc Winter had called the police the night he found Maggie’s bludgeoned body. An orange-painted steel mesh walkway led out across one hundred feet of sparse-growing marshgrass to the complex of floating docks where the boats were moored.

I once asked Des why they didn’t construct a nice boardwalk to replace the esthetically offensive steel gridwork. “Ecology,” he said. “Can’t keep the sun off the vegetation. It’d disrupt the delicate balance of things.” Des pointed down at the sere grass that sprouted up around the beer cans, empty potato chip bags, and discarded bait containers. “The brainstorm of some desk jockey in Washington, no doubt.”

The marina was constructed like a T that had been crossed a dozen times. I guessed that fifty boats were moored there. Bertrams, Egg Harbors, Grady-Whites, Makos, and Chris-Crafts, serious ocean-going vessels for serious fishermen, along with Boston Whalers and ballistic-shaped speedboats and a variety of sloops and yawls.
Constance,
Des’s Bertram, was moored in her usual slip, I noticed. There seemed to be no sawhorses or signs or ribbons to indicate that she was out of bounds. The police, evidently, had completed their forensic research on her.

Snooker Lynch was crouched at the very end of the long central pier. His bicycle lay beside him, its handlebars upturned, its front wheel cockeyed, so that it looked like a huge wounded insect. I approached him quietly. He sat on the edge, dangling his legs. A plastic bucket and a cardboard container like the kind for leftover chow mein sat on the dock beside him. The latter contained his bait, I guessed.

His body was arched tensely forward. He held the line in his fingers like a flute, his wrists cocked delicately beside his ear as if he might hear the nibble of a fish. I stood behind him for a minute without disturbing him. I lit a cigarette. He sat as still and rigid as a statue. The wooden dock rolled rhythmically under my feet. The tide was pushing upriver. It was good to fish the incoming tide, I knew.

I coughed and said, “Mr. Lynch?”

He swiveled his head very slowly and peered at me for a moment. Then he returned his attention to his line. I moved forward and sat beside him.

“How are they biting?”

He shook his head without looking at me.

“I want you to tell me about the man you saw with Maggie.”

He shook his head again.

“Did that man kill her?”

He twitched the line he was holding, pretending, I figured, to be more interested in the fishing than our conversation.

“Did she kill him, then?”

He hauled in his line with an awkward hand-overhand motion. His hook and the one-ounce oval lead sinker came in festooned with seaweed. He plucked it off with the patience of an old woman undoing a mistake in her needlepoint. When he had cleaned off the hook, he reached into the cardboard container and plucked out a sandworm, an ugly lizardlike creature with cruel pincers and lots of legs. He placed it on the dock beside him, produced a knife from a sheath at his hip, and sliced the critter neatly in half. Both halves writhed and wriggled. He picked up one half and deposited it in the Chinese food container. The other half he impaled on his hook, which he lowered between his legs into the river. The line made an upstream arc as the accelerating tide bowed it.

Without looking at me, Snooker began to make sounds, a series of false starts that I had the sense not to interrupt. Finally he came out with “Wone talka please,” which I understood to mean that he wouldn’t talk to the police. It was amazing how much easier he was to understand face to face than over the telephone.

“I’m not asking you to talk to the police. But please tell me what you saw.”

His fingers gently strummed and plucked his fishline. “You shook my hand,” he managed finally to say. Then he said, “You called me mister.”

He lapsed into silence, as if that had explained everything. I flipped my cigarette butt into the water. It meant that he would talk to me, because I had extended him the simple everyday courtesy I’d extend to any man. It also suggested that, at one time in his life, he had tried to talk to the police, earning a ruder response.

“I spoke with your aunt,” I said to him. I took my cue from him, not looking at him, but studying the river that flowed the wrong way in front of us. “She thought I might find you here.”

“Going to catch supper for her,” he sputtered. It came out, “Gonkitch sufferer.”

“She’s very nice. She told me your name was Ernest. Do you prefer to be called Ernest?”

“Snooker’s okay.”

I lit another cigarette. I tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned I held the Winston pack to him. He frowned and shook his head. “Cancer,” he said, this word pronounced very clearly.

“You’re right,” I said, and he smiled.

“Eyesore maybe swisher ballman,”
he said. Except this time it was clear to me what he was saying. “I saw Maggie with the bald man.”

I waited, and after a few minutes he began to talk. Sunday afternoon he had been pedaling down High Street. As he passed Des Winter’s house, he noticed a car stopped in front, its motor running. Maggie was standing by the window on the driver’s side, leaning down, evidently giving directions. The driver, said Snooker, was bald.

That night he went to the marina to fish. He had just started to push his bicycle over the steel mesh walkway when headlights shone behind him. He turned to look, and when he did he recognized Marc Winter’s pickup. He saw Marc get out of his truck and go to the pay phone by the marina office. “Numba biz,” said Snooker, shaking his head. None of his business. He continued on his way to the end of the pier and began fishing. A few minutes later police cars began to pull up. He ignored them. But a cop wearing a suit approached him and began to question him. “Furry,” said Snooker. Fourier. Snooker told Fourier what he had seen. The policeman, I inferred from the new anger that accompanied Snooker’s sputters and grunts, had prodded and cross-examined him to the point where he refused to say any more.

I guessed that he had perfected the trick of acting stupider than I figured he really was. His speech impediment did not necessarily denote a brain impediment of the same magnitude. Snooker was smart enough, all right. Smart enough at least to know when it was better to let others think he was dumb. In any case, Fourier gave up and left him alone.

The next afternoon he overheard talk in town about Nathan Greenberg’s murder in nearby Danvers. To Snooker, Greenberg wasn’t
a
bald man. He was
the
bald man. So he called me. Because I was probably the only person who had recently treated him like a man rather than an imbecile.

It was a long shot that Greenberg was the same bald man Maggie had given directions to the day they both were killed.

“What kind of car was the bald man driving?” I asked Snooker.

“Blue Citation,” he replied promptly, although what he said didn’t sound exactly like that.

“Are you sure?”

He frowned and the corners of his mouth turned down. He looked as if he might cry.

I touched his arm. “You must know your cars,” I said quickly.

He nodded vigorously. I hoped I hadn’t lost him.

“And what did the man look like?”

“Ballman. No hair.”

“None at all?”

Snooker grinned wetly. “Nonatall.”

“Was he wearing glasses?”

He shook his head.

“Beard or mustache?”

“Nonatall,” he said proudly, as if he had learned a new word.

He suddenly ducked his head forward. His fingers caressed the fishline as if he were stroking a woman. With a grunt he jerked the line upward. A moment later he dragged in a fish. It looked like a gray rubber football that had been run over by a truck. A flounder. Snooker unhooked it tenderly and dropped it into his bucket. He rebaited and lowered his line.

I stood up. “Looks like they’re starting to bite. I’ll be on my way.”

He turned and looked up. Then he smiled. He wiped his hand across the front of his shirt and held it to me. I shook it. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Lynch,” I said. He nodded and turned back to his line.

It was a little past five thirty when I got to the Grog. Both the downstairs and the upstairs bars were full, the after-work crowd, the majority businessmen in suits with vests, the rest young women clustered in protective pairs and trios. I took a table in the back section of the downstairs dining room and ordered a bourbon old-fashioned. Then I went to the pay phone and put through a credit card call to Horowitz.

When he came on the line, I said, “One more thing.”

“You’re a pest, Coyne.”

“Thank you. You don’t happen to still have the stuff on the Greenberg murder on your desk, do you?”

I heard him sigh. “Been keeping it here, all excited that you might call me back.”

“Great. Tell me again what kind of car he was driving, then.”

“I’m too tired even to ask why.” He ruffled some papers. “Chevy Citation. Blue. Hertz rental. I think I already told you this.”

“You did, yes. And Greenberg himself. Just how bald was he?”

“Jesus,” muttered Horowitz. “I got a photo here. Bald. Very bald. Completely bald, actually. Hard to tell, but maybe he shaved his skull.”

“Mustache or beard?”

“Eyebrows’re about it in the hair department.”

“Did Greenberg wear glasses?”

He paused. Then he said, “Nothing about glasses here. They didn’t find any glasses.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Hey, wait.”

“What?”

“You going to tell me what this is all about?”

“I think Maggie Winter and Nathan Greenberg knew each other.”

“You think?”

“For now, that’s it, yeah. I think.”

“You’ll keep me posted?”

“I’ll share every one of my dumb hunches with you.”

He blew a bubble and popped it loudly in the telephone. “You better,” he said.

Kat showed up at twenty after six. She was wearing a pale flowered silky dress, sleeveless and scoop-necked. It showed off her silvery-blond hair and light, buttery tan.

She slid into the seat across from me and grinned. “What’re we drinking? I’m parched.”

“I’m starting my second old-fashioned. You’re early.”

She flapped her eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “I just couldn’t wait.”

The waitress appeared. Kat ordered a gin and tonic. Then she said to me, “You’re on your second drink, you’ve been here a while. You must be very excited.”

I shrugged elaborately. “Nowhere else to go, that’s all.”

“A man of steel.” She reached across the table and rested her fingers on top of my hand. Her nails scratched my skin lightly. “Mr. Unseductable, huh?”

“That’s me.” I turned my palm up and held her hand for a moment before she smiled and gently pulled it away. “How’s Des doing?” I asked.

Her eyes clouded. “Not that good, like I told you on the phone. He’s—I think this is reminding him of—you know, what happened…”

“Your mother,” I prompted.

She nodded. “Anyway, Daddy liked Maggie. I suspect she and my—they were a lot alike at that age or something. Living with Marc doesn’t help him. I mean, after all…”

“You still believe Marc is responsible?”

The waitress appeared and placed Kat’s gin and tonic on the table in front of her. Kat looked up and smiled quickly and brilliantly, an actress’s trick, a meaningless but utterly persuasive smile in the middle of her disturbing thought, like being able to nod your head up and down while saying no.

Kat’s smile faded as instantly as it had appeared. “Oh, he’s responsible, all right,” she said. “I’m not saying Marc did it. But there’s something. He knows something.”

She tilted up her glass and took a long swig. When she lowered the drink she smiled at me and shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “enough of that. I’m famished. What’ll we have?”