Follow the Sharks (17 page)

“Sam, I—”

“No. Wait. I’m not saying it’d be better if E.J. was dead than alive. But you know and I know in our hearts that he’s dead. But we don’t
know,
understand? You gotta see a body, go to a funeral, have the priest say his thing, to really
know
it. That’s what I mean.
You
don’t think he’s alive, do you?”

I shook my head. “I guess I don’t, Sam. But there is hope, still.”

“Ahh!” he exploded, bringing the palm of his hand down on the table. “That’s just bullshit, Coyne. And you know it.” But Sam’s tone lacked conviction, and I realized that he still hoped, and that the pain in his belly fed on his hope, and that the day Sam woke up without that ache in his gut would be a sad day for him.

I put my hand on Sam Farina’s thick wrist, and he covered it with his own hand and turned his face away from me. I gave his wrist a quick squeeze and pulled my hand back. I stood up. “I’m going to try to find Eddie,” I told him. “I want you and Josie and Jan to know that I’m doing what I can, and maybe it doesn’t make much sense, but it’s something, at least. And I know that Stern hasn’t given up, either. I think Annie is telling me that finding Eddie will help us to find E.J. I don’t know how or why, but that’s what I’m going to do.”

Sam looked at me. “Do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“If you find that cocksucker Donagan, slug him in the stomach for me. Make him feel the pain that we’re feeling. Will you do that for me?”

“Sam,” I said, “I have the feeling that Eddie’s got the same pain you do already.”

He nodded slowly. “I don’t know whether he does or not, but I hope the hell you’re right. I’d think better of him if he did.”

The telephone beside my bed jarred me from my sleep. I fumbled for it, cleared my throat, and said, “Yes?”

“This is Nathan downstairs,” came the voice of the night man.

“Christ, Nathan. What time is it?”

“It’s nearly three o’clock, sir.”

“What do you want?”

“There are two men who want to see you.”

“At three o’clock in the morning?”

“They’re policemen.”

“Oh. What do they want?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Well, send them up, then.”

“I already did, sir. They’re on their way.”

I switched on the light, found a Winston and lit it, and pulled on my jeans. Then I rescued my sneakers, one from the bathroom next to the toilet and one from under the kitchen table, and slipped them on without socks. The knock at the door was soft and polite.

The two men at the door wore State Police uniforms. “I’m Garrity and this is Laski,” said the younger of the two. “We’d like you to come with us, Mr. Coyne.”

“Is it one of my boys? Jesus! Did something happen to Billy or Joey?” I felt a flush of panic rise in my cheeks.

Laski glanced at Garrity. “No, sir. It’s nothing like that. Lieutenant Travers asked us to come for you. He’ll explain.”

I exhaled hard, as if I were blowing out a match. Travers was the State Police inspector who had been at Sam Farina’s house with Stern when we were discussing the delivery of E.J.’s ransom money.

“Does this have something to do with E.J. Donagan, then?” I asked the two cops.

“We’re not at liberty to say, sir,” said Garrity. “The Lieutenant will explain. Are you ready to go?”

I pulled on a shirt and tucked a pack of Winstons into the pocket. “Okay.”

In the elevator Laski and Garrity stood at attention, staring at the numbers as they blinked backwards from six to one. We got out and marched through the lobby. Nathan, sitting at his table by the front door, raised his hand to me, and I smiled and nodded to reassure him that I didn’t think I was under arrest.

The cruiser was parked directly in front of the door. The two policemen got in front and I climbed into the back seat. Laski took the wheel. He pulled sedately out of the short driveway and onto Atlantic Avenue. Then he turned on the siren, tromped on the accelerator, and the car shot forward through the dark, abandoned city streets. We cut up State Street through the banking district, then over past Government Center onto Cambridge Street. We circled the rotary near Mass General and suddenly took a sharp right where there was no road and sped across the narrow grassy strip that separated the Charles River Basin from the highway. As we careened through the dark I could see ahead of us the pulsing flash of blue and red lights, and, reflected in their strobelike glare was the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops puts on its annual Fourth of July extravaganza.

We skidded to a stop, and Garrity and Laski got out. “Come on, Mr. Coyne,” said Garrity. “This way.”

I followed the two policemen toward the group of erratically parked vehicles. A tough-looking, white-haired guy wearing a short sleeved white shirt with a striped tie pulled loose at the throat detached himself from the crowd of mostly uniformed men and approached me. Garrity and Laski melted away.

He held out his hand. “Travers,” he said.

I gripped his hand. “I remember,” I said. “We’ve met. What’s this all about?”

“Stern said you should come. He’s over here.”

Travers turned and walked back toward the cluster of people. I followed him. He tapped a short man on the shoulder. When he turned I saw that it was Marty Stern. Stern looked at me through his thick horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t bother to offer his hand.

“Come over here, Coyne,” he said.

We pushed through the crowd. They had gathered around a woman slumped on a bench. She wore dark blue slacks and a red shirt. She had long, straight dark hair. Stern gestured toward her, then bent over and lifted her head gently with both of his hands so I could see her face. What I saw, though, wasn’t her face, but the bright red semicircle under her chin, and the big splash of blood down the front of her. Her dark tilted dead eyes stared past me.

I looked away and gulped back the bile that rose in my throat.

“Look at her,” said Stern. “Is this the one?”

I nodded without turning my head.

“Are you sure?”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m sure.” I forced myself to look at her again. The slash across her throat cut deep, through the tendons and tubes that connected her head to her body. They stood out white against the red of the rest of the wound. Annie’s shirt, I noticed, had once been white, but the entire front of it was soaked in crimson blood, still gleaming moist in the lights from the flashlights and automobiles.

Stern lowered her head back onto her chest, wiped his hands on his pants, and took my arm. He steered me to another bench nearby, and we sat beside each other. I turned my body sideways so I wouldn’t see all the professionals working at Annie’s body.

I tried to light a cigarette. My hands shook. I steadied one with the other so that I could direct the flame of my Zippo onto the tip of my Winston. I dragged deeply on it. “That’s her,” I said. “That’s Annie. She was right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Talking to me. Helping. She said it was dangerous. She shouldn’t have done it.”

Stern shrugged. “I wouldn’t blame yourself. She knew what she was doing. You didn’t force her.”

I looked sharply at him. “Don’t bullshit me. It’s my fault she’s dead.”

Stern smiled as though he’d heard it all before. “That’s ridiculous,” he said mildly.

My mind whirled with half-formed thoughts. “It means she
was
helping us, though, doesn’t it? What she was trying to give us, it was important, then. Otherwise, they…”

“Maybe,” said Stern. “Maybe not. It could mean they knew she was in touch with you, anyway.” Stern touched my arm so that I would look up at him. “The interesting thing is that they did it here, where they knew she’d be found, and they did it this way, so that we’d know exactly why they did it. To shut her up. They could have dumped her body into the bay, or in a dumpster, or into a concrete form on Route 95 if they’d wanted to. But they wanted us to see this. Yes. I agree. There is a message here, Coyne. Do you get the message?”

I nodded. “I get the message.”

“Time to leave it to the pros.”

“That’s the message. Yes.”

What Stern didn’t need to say, because he figured I understood it perfectly already, was this: If somebody was willing to cut Annie’s throat and leave her to bleed to death on a bench by the Hatch Shell because she had given information to a nosy lawyer, what was to prevent them from seeing that the nosy lawyer met the same fate?

That was the message.

“The other thing,” began Stern.

“I know the other thing,” I said quickly. “The other thing is that it doesn’t look very good for E.J. Donagan. Right?”

Stern shrugged, then nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Yes.”

“Or Eddie Donagan, either.”

“What do you mean?”

I told Stern what I had inferred from the list of names Annie had given me, that it pointed straight to Eddie, and about the Sherlock Holmes book I assumed she had left for me.

“Could be,” mused Stern. “I don’t see how he’s connected, though. Donagan didn’t kidnap the kid, we know that. Maybe he knew something, or figured something out. He hasn’t been heard from, huh?”

“No. I talked to Sam Farina just today. Yesterday, that is. No one there has heard from him.” I flicked my cigarette away. “Maybe Eddie’s floating in the bay or taking up space in a bridge abutment somewhere.”

“One good thing, anyway,” said Stern.

“Yeah?”

“We’ll be able to figure out who the hell she is. That could lead us somewhere.”

“Do you think they’d leave her body like this for us if we could trace them through her?”

“It’s possible. We’ll see. In the meantime, I think you better go back to drawing up wills and separation agreements.”

“That’s probably good advice.”

I glanced over to where Annie’s body slumped on the bench. A police photographer was snapping pictures. The blinks of light from his flash were being soaked up by the brightening sky overhead. Bursts of static came from the radios in the official vehicles, which crouched there with their motors running and their doors open like animals of prey. Now and then came the unruffled voice of a female dispatcher, droning numbers and code words. The policemen and medics stood around, talking in low muffled tones, waiting for their turn to perform their given function.

I knew Stern’s advice was sound. I had to admit that he was right. There was a message there for me, and it would be stupid to ignore it.

T
HE SKY ALONG THE
horizon was turning from black to purple when officers Garrity and Laski dropped me off at my apartment. I pried my sneakers off with my toes and kicked them against the wall, loaded up my electric coffee pot, and shucked off my clothes. The shower felt good, and I let it run as cold as I could bear it. It failed, however, to wash away the image of that gaping half-moon wound on Annie’s ivory throat. The tighter I squeezed my eyes shut, the redder I remembered her blood. She couldn’t have been dead long. The blood that had splashed over her breasts and puddled in her lap had only just begun to cake and turn brown.

I dried myself, shaved, and slipped on some clean clothes. The coffee was ready, so I poured myself a big mug. Suddenly I was hungry. In the face of that awful death, I was starving, and I felt ashamed to be so aware of my own life processes.

In the back of the refrigerator I found four white cardboard cartons with little wire handles—salvage from a jaunt Sylvie and I had taken a week earlier to the Yangtze River Restaurant in Lexington. I took them out, lined them up on the counter beside the stove, and opened them one at a time. Beef and pea pods in thick brown gravy. Sub Gum pork fried rice. Sweet and sour shrimp with chunks of pineapple and blood-red cherries. Moo Goo Gai Pan—little bits of chicken with mushrooms, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and other good stuff.

I dumped the contents of the four cartons into a big skillet, stirred them all together, sloshed on some soy sauce, put it on low heat, and covered it. A real country breakfast. Then I took my coffee out onto the balcony to see if the sun would come up.

It did, right on schedule, spilling crimson over the rippled surface of the ocean and staining the high clouds with a color not unlike what I had seen a few hours earlier on Annie’s white blouse.

New England mariners knew what it meant: “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”

I fiddled with a couplet of my own as I sipped my coffee. Bloody blouse at night/Should give dumb attorney fright.

It didn’t scan, but the message was there, and I knew it. Marty Stern had been telling me all along I was in over my head, but some mix of guilt and adolescent adventurousness had prevented me from leaving the cops and robbers stuff to the cops and robbers.

The lower rim of the sun cleared the horizon. Its motion was visible proof that our planet continued to rotate, as did all the other planets in the solar system, and all the other clusters of celestial bodies in the ever-expanding universe. What had begun as a big bang a few billion years ago wouldn’t be affected much by the behavior of a few clusters of protoplasm on one of those whirling chunks of matter.

What egoism, to think that anything we did in the eye-wink of our lives meant a damn thing in the grand cosmic scheme of things—or to postulate a God who watched over it and gave a damn.

I went back into my kitchen and lifted the lid on the skillet to sniff the steam that burst out. It looked awful—a brownish, glutinous mush—and smelled terrific, which reminded me of a really raunchy joke Charlie McDevitt had told me once. I dumped it onto a plate, poured myself a second mug of coffee, and sat at the table to eat my breakfast. The most important meal of the day.

I was chasing the last bits of fried rice around the edges of my plate when the phone rang. I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t even six yet.

“Yeah?” I answered.

“Stern. Thought you might want to know. We’ve ID’d the girl.”

“You guys work fast.”

“This is the sort of thing we’re good at. One of the marvels of the computer age. Send a set of fingerprints down to Washington electronically, the big machine clanks and whirrs, and up on the screen pops the information.”