Death at Charity's Point (12 page)

“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.

W
ASHINGTON 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?”

She hesitated. “A Miss Prescott? From The Ruggles School?”

When Julie transformed a declarative sentence into an interrogative by her rising inflection at the end, she was asking for an explanation. I chose to ignore this hinted request, for reasons I couldn’t identify.

“Okay,” I said into the phone. “I’ll try her from here. Then I’ll be in to drop off the report, and you can go after it’s typed. That okay?”

“Is it long?”

“The report? Naw. You’ll beat the Friday traffic, no problem.”

“Sure.”

“Honest,” I said.

I hung up, found an ancient can of Black Label in the back of the refrigerator, and took it back to my desk where the telephone sat. I got the number of The Ruggles School from the operator and dialed it.

The girl who answered told me that I was in the most unusual good luck, that Miss Prescott just happened to be conferring with Mr. Elliott that very moment and that she’d instructed her to please interrupt if she received a call.

Rina Prescott’s voice, as it came over the phone, was softer and huskier than I had remembered it being in person.

“It’s Brady Coyne, Miss Prescott,” I said. “I’m returning your call.”

I heard a soft chuckle. “Tell you the truth, Mr. Coyne, I’m going slightly bananas with this play. The curtain goes up in—less than seven and a half hours, my God!—and there’s another performance, quote unquote, tomorrow night. And then, good my lord, I intend to render myself blissfully and totally inebriated. I’m kidding. The lighting board is busted and our esteemed leader—oops, I can’t talk that way around here—Mr. Elliott, our distinguished Headmaster, is telling me that we aren’t budgeted for repairs to the lighting board, and anyway he doesn’t think we can find an electrician who knows how to work on it, and without the damn thing the play just doesn’t work. It’ll be another high-school Shakespeare. Yuck! And that would kill me.” I could hear her take in a deep breath. I remained silent, feeling more than a little overwhelmed by her outburst.

“Look, Mr. Coyne,” she continued, her voice somewhat calmer. “I found your card in my pocket this afternoon and I remembered that I’d promised to call you. Obviously I’m in no condition to discuss George with you now. Or much of anything, for that matter. How about after this play is over? Would that be okay?”

“How about dinner? Sunday.” It came out of my mouth unbidden. I didn’t know I was going to say that. But there it was, zipping along the telephone wires from my mouth to her ears.

She didn’t answer for so long that I assumed I’d offended her, which wouldn’t have surprised me. I’m good at that.

“Look, Miss Prescott, maybe…”

“No. No, that would be nice. Terrific, in fact. Perfect. Marvelous. I was just thinking…”

“I didn’t mean to be forward. I’m sorry. We can talk again, when things are less hectic for you.”

“I’d really like the dinner, Mr. Coyne,” she said, her voice low and intimate, as if there were other people in the room who she didn’t want to hear her. “Really.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, good. I know a good spot not far from your school. You probably never heard of it. Run by an old Neapolitan dame named Gert. Not much on atmosphere, but it beats the hell out of all the Gloucester places for seafood. And Italian, if you’re at all partial to Italian. Authentic Italian.”

“I love Italian,” she said. “It sounds perfect. That is, if you don’t mind having a zombie for company. Tell me how to find it. I’ll meet you there. About when? Sevenish?”

I told her seven was perfect, and gave her directions to Gert’s. “And good luck with the play, Miss Prescott. Remember, ‘To show our simple skill, that is the true beginning of our end.’”

“At which point my kids want to moon the audience,” she laughed. “Good old Quince. I had forgotten you knew the play.”

“Break a couple of legs,” I said.

“Thank you, m’lord. God dig you den. See you at Gert’s.”

I hung up the phone, drained my Black Label, and smiled. Damn! She had a good voice.

When I got to the office it was nearly three o’clock, about the time on a Friday afternoon in May when most respectable Boston businessmen are evacuating the city to gather up their wives and kids and dogs in the station wagon to set sail for points Capeward or Maine-coastward. I had no family, no wagon, and no destinations in Maine or on the Cape. I didn’t mind moving against the traffic.

Julie, however, did. When I dropped the Paradise report onto her desk, her shoulders slumped.

“You really need this today?”

I shrugged. “Monday’ll be all right, I guess. Tell you what. Get this Dr. Wertz on the phone for me, and you can go. Okay?”

She flipped me a little smart-ass salute. “Fair enough,” she said.

Leonard Wertz, M.D., whose name appeared on the Blue Shield forms in George Gresham’s files, I figured was his allergist. Maybe George suffered from high blood pressure, or hemorrhoids, or postnasal drip. Whatever. I had promised Florence that I’d do what I could. A chat with George’s doctor seemed reasonable.

Julie buzzed me in a minute. “Dr. Wertz will not consult with you on the telephone. So says his snippy little secretary. So you gotta see him in his office. I made an appointment for you for Monday. Okay?”

I sighed. “Aw, shit, Julie. I don’t want to drive all the way to Danvers to talk with some guy about ragweed and house dust.”

“Huh?”

“George’s allergist. Wertz.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“What idea?”

“That the doctor is an allergist.”

“I don’t know. Something Dr. Clapp said. It doesn’t matter. Don’t get picky with me, Julie. Not on a Friday afternoon. So he’s an oculist, or a podiatrist, or an oral surgeon. I just want to find out what ailed poor old George, that’s all. Simple question. So he’s not an allergist.”

“No. He’s not. He’s a psychiatrist.”

“Really? No shit?”

“No shit, Counselor. Dr. Wertz was Mr. Gresham’s shrink.”

“Monday, huh?”

“Right.”

“I think maybe I’ll keep that appointment.”

Weekends.

Once upon a time weekends meant The Great American Suburban Dream to me. I bought it all, the whole big package. And I loved it.

That was years ago, in another life of mine, when the boys were small and Gloria and I lived in the Garrison colonial in Wellesley, when Saturdays were family days and Sundays I played golf at the country club while Gloria and the boys went to the pool, and afterward we ate tunafish sandwiches together. Gloria and I would have gin-and-tonics, the boys Cokes, and I’d limit myself to one drink. Then I’d wander into the locker room to join the poker game for a couple hours while we watched the Red Sox, and later, when it got cooler, Gloria and I would take on the Stetsons for a couple sets of mixed doubles.

That was one of my other lives. The next other life came in the early years of the divorce. I had the boys on Saturdays, then. I’d pick them up early for a frenetic day of entertainment—the Stoneham Zoo, the Aquarium, Fenway Park, the Boston Garden, the Peabody Museum. We drove to Plimoth Plantation one Saturday, and another time to Sturbridge Village. I wanted to be a Worthy Parent, and acquaint my sons with New England Culture.

We tried very hard, all three of us, to be at ease with each other. And we were all relieved when the day ended and I dropped them off with Mommy.