Marine Corpse (12 page)

“Oh, you rascal,” she said. “Hang on. Charlie’s right here.”

“Hey, you wanna go ice fishin’?” Charlie’s voice boomed into the phone. “They’re taking big brown trout out of Walden, I hear.”

“I can think of easier ways to freeze my ass off,” I said. “I want to try out a name on you.”

“What sort of a name?”

“Guy with the DEA”

“We should be able to pop that up on the computer. What’s the name?”

“Becker, Gus.”

“Hold on. I’ll give it to Freddy.” I heard Charlie speak to somebody, then he came back to the phone. “It’ll take just a minute. Damn computers. Make everything too easy.”

“Julie’s been after me to get one.”

“We were talking here the other day,” said Charlie. “Freddy, our computer whiz, was saying how he thought the computer was the best thing ever invented. Jimmy Duckworth was there, and he said that, in terms of the total impact on civilization and all, he’d vote for the gasoline engine as man’s number one invention. What do you think, Brady?”

“Shit, I don’t know. How about the condom?”

“No, I’m serious, Brady. Lou, the Chinese guy, he said gunpowder, for the way it changed around warfare.”

“Gunpowder was very good,” I said.

“Another fella in here said electricity. Somebody pointed out that, strictly speaking, electricity was a discovery, not an invention. Right?”

“Sure. You’re absolutely right, Charlie.”

“Anyway, I told the guys that they were all wrong, if they’d only think about it. It’s really pretty obvious. The greatest thing ever invented has to be the Thermos bottle.”

“The Thermos bottle,” I said.

“Easy. Hands down. No contest.”

“Okay, Charlie. How do you figure the Thermos bottle?”

“Look,” he said. “You put soup in it, the Thermos bottle keeps it hot. You put martinis in it, it keeps them cold.”

I sighed. “So what, Charlie?”

“Well, shit, man. How does it
know
?”

I groaned.

“Hang on,” said Charlie. “Freddy’s got a printout here for us. Let’s see. Okay. Becker, Augustus. Born December nine, nineteen thirty-eight, Des Moines, Iowa. BA University of Iowa nineteen fifty-nine, blah, blah. What do you want to know, anyway?”

“He’s with the DEA, then?”

“Sure. Just like you said. Been all over. Europe, Middle East, South America. Working out of Washington right now.”

“He’s here. In Boston.”

“Well, sure. That would make sense. Anybody working the east coast would be working out of Washington.”

“That’s all I wanted, I guess,” I said.

“That’s it, huh?”

“Yup.”

“Well, you wanna try some ice fishing, let me know. I’ll bring the Thermos bottle, keep our coffee hot.”

“How would it
know
?” I said, and hung up.

Gus Becker called me the next morning. I told him to come on over. He arrived in less than an hour.

Julie showed him into my office. He sat on the same sofa that Altoona always took. He crossed his ankle over his knee, hooked his elbows over the back of the sofa, and grinned. “Your secretary’s got a nice ass.”

I nodded without smiling. “I will help you,” I said.

He nodded: “I figured that’s why you invited me over. What’ve you got for me?”

I picked up the stack of papers that I had left sitting on the corner of my desk and handed it to him. He held it in his hands and narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s this?”

“Stu’s notebooks. You guessed right. He left them with me.”

Becker grinned. “What’s in ’em?”

“I don’t know. Stu’s handwriting is terrible. I haven’t tried to decipher them.”

Becker looked down and started to riffle through the pages. “These are photocopies,” he said.

“Yes. Does it matter?”

He picked up one random page and held it close to his face. “Hard as hell to read.”

“It’s the best I can do for you.”

“Where’s the originals?”

“Stu’s roommate has them. She’s thinking of doing some sort of book.”

He glanced up at me. “No kidding?”

I shrugged.

He put the stack of papers back onto his lap. “You going to sit down, Mr. Coyne, or are you trying to tell me that I should leave?”

I sat on the chair across from him and lit a cigarette. He studied me with those narrow smoke-colored eyes. “So,” he said after a moment. “What else can you tell me?”

“I checked up on you,” I said.

“I figured you were going to. Glad you did.”

“If you really are who I guess you are, then there’s no reason for me not to do all I can to help you.”

“No reason whatsoever.”

“Do you really think Stu’s murder was purposeful?”

“If you mean not random, yes, I believe that,” said Becker. “I think it was drug connected.”

“Stu was assassinated, then?”

Becker shrugged. “Call it what you will. The police are off base, I can tell you that.”

“Well, there is one other thing,” I said.

Becker showed no eagerness. He just gazed at me.

“Stu was gay.”

Becker nodded. He didn’t seem particularly surprised. “That might fit,” he said after a moment. “It might mean something. Was he a flirt, do you know?”

“You mean did he pick up guys?”

He nodded impatiently. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he had a lover.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“I suppose I could try.”

“Did Carver do drugs, Mr. Coyne? That you know of, I mean.”

“I don’t know.”

He shrugged, then patted the stack of papers on his lap. “I hope you won’t be needing these right away.”

“Just so that I get them back eventually,” I said.

“Sure. No problem.” He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket, tore out a page, and scribbled onto it. Then he handed it to me. “Here’s a couple of phone numbers where I can be reached. If you hear anything, or think of anything, please call me.”

I took the paper from him. Then he stood up and moved toward the door. I followed him. He put his hand on the knob, then turned to face me.

“Sorry about jerking you around yesterday, Mr. Coyne. Reflex, I guess.”

I shrugged. “I hadn’t noticed.”

He laughed and clapped me on my shoulder. He opened the door. “Don’t forget,” he said. “If anything comes up, give me a buzz.”

Later that afternoon I punched my fist into my palm and muttered, “God damn it,” and called Ben Woodhouse at home.

“How’d it go with Becker?” he said.

“Fine. I cooperated.”

“Good. That’s good, Brady. Now, I expect you called to tell me how we’re going to handle that business with Stu’s condominium.”

“There’s only one way to handle it,” I said. “Drop it.”

I heard Ben clear his throat. Ben cleared his throat when he was angry. “I want this case handled, not dropped, Brady.”

“I am not going to handle it, Ben.”

“Well, now, I thought we discussed that. Meriam is quite adamant, you know. She wants the girl out of there.”

“And I gave her my best advice.”

“Well, yes, I know you did. However, that’s not the way we’re going to go with this one, Brady. The family has decided.”

“I understand that,” I said. “If you’d like, I’ll recommend an attorney for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Count me out, Ben.”

He was silent for a moment. “What exactly are you saying, Brady?”

“I quit.”

“What the hell do you mean, you quit?”

“I mean what I said. I quit. Get yourself and Meriam another attorney.”

“Hell, man…”

I hung up before I could hear the rest of it.

“Y
OU KNOW,” SAID HEATHER,
reaching across the small table to touch my hand, “we haven’t talked about Stu all evening. That’s been kinda nice.”

I smiled and nodded. My knee was bouncing in rhythm to the good jazz of the group that called itself “IUD”—a private joke of theirs, I assumed. They had a bass and a piano and a sax and percussion, and their sound was good New Orleans blues, with hints of Ellington and Garner and Getz melded in, and I liked it. The place was dark and intimate and not very crowded. Heather and I had a table close enough to the four black musicians so that we could smile and nod our approval to them and they could bow toward us in reply. The drinks were cheap and generous.

I feared the place would go out of business soon, the same way that the Jazz Workshop and Paul’s Mall in Copley Square had a decade or so ago. Unamplified music in Boston was not big business these days, and this little spot on the edge of the sticks on Route 9 didn’t have much of a chance.

Earlier, Heather and I had had big slabs of prime rib at Finnerty’s. We had agreed not to bore each other with our life stories. Our decision to avoid talking about Stu Carver had been tacit.

“Actually,” I said to her, “you are quite a beautiful woman.”

“I love that ‘actually,’” she said. “Clearly you are attempting to refute an obvious piece of conventional wisdom. Very obvious, what with this big turnip for nose and this mouthful of crooked teeth.” But she smiled, and it all fit together, as I thought she realized. She had the kind of look that sneaks up on you—not striking or dramatic, like lanky blondes with Farrah Fawcett hair. But her warm good nature shone through. “Ah, I’m just this dumpy Jewish kid,” she added, and crossed her eyes at me.

“I’ll bet you’d like me to elaborate,” I said.

“No. I know when to leave well enough alone.”

“Like the music?”

“Very much. It’s been a nice evening. Good food, good music. Company hasn’t been all that bad, either.”

I squeezed her hand and then let it go. I picked up my drink. “There are some things we need to talk about,” I said.

She nodded. “Here it comes.”

“First, just for your information, I no longer call the Woodhouse clan my clients.”

“Because of me, huh?”

“Not really. Because they do not accept the legal counsel they pay me for. It happened to come to a head over your condominium.”

“Brady, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I feel rather good about it, actually. Anyway, I won’t go hungry. The point is, they seem fixed on pursuing the case in court. I’m certain they’ll get nowhere with it. Still, make sure you talk it over with Zerk.”

She nodded. “What else? Was there something else?”

I lit a cigarette. “I met this guy the other day. Friend of Ben Woodhouse who’s some kind of federal agent. He’s with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and he’s interested in Stu’s death.”

“Interested,” she said. “Interested how? I don’t get it.”

“Did Stu do drugs?”

She scowled. “I still don’t get it.”

I explained Gus Becker’s hypothesis to her—that Stu might have been murdered because he had become involved in, or had learned something about, the cocaine war in Boston. I took it slow and careful with her, watching her face for a reaction. Throughout my recitation Heather’s eyes never left mine, and the frown never left her face.

When I had finished, she said, “Oh, wow! That is wild.”

I nodded. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“Did Stu do drugs? That’s some question. Really. I mean, everybody does drugs. But everybody doesn’t get an icepick stuck into their head. Jesus! Yeah, sure, Stu would do a couple lines of coke once in a while. That’s no big deal. We’d do a little grass occasionally. But nothing heavy, Brady. Listen. I know about big drug use. I’ve seen it. I know about cocaine, what it can do, how people can get ruined by it. It was nothing like that with Stu. He cared about his body. He took care of it. He ate well and exercised. If anything, I suppose he drank too much. But he wasn’t crazy. You tell me about drug wars and South American dealers and people killing each other and all I can say is that I knew Stuart Carver and he would never never get involved in something like that.”

“But if he used coke, even just occasionally, he had to buy it somewhere,” I persisted.

“He had a friend. Definitely not a dealer or anything.”

“Was this friend by any chance also his lover?”

Heather made her eyes go wide. “My, aren’t we the shrewd attorney, now.”

“Okay,” I went on, “and if this friend had drug connections, then Stu might have known about them. Q.E.D.”

“Oh, Q.E-bullshit,” she snorted. “You’re on the wrong track. You’re way off, believe me. Hey, maybe he found out about something, I don’t know about that. Although there’s nothing in the notebooks to suggest it, as far as I can tell. But I am absolutely positive that Stu was not involved in anything. That is really far out.”

“Tell me about his friend.”

She let her shoulders sag. Then she reached again for my hand. “I can’t, Brady. I can’t violate their trust. Either of them. I am the only person on earth who knew about them.”

“Maybe not.”

She cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“Think about it.”

She shifted her eyes to watch the musicians. They were doing something slow and syncopated that might have had its roots in Bach, the pianist and the guy on the sax taking cues from each other. It was compelling, and I assumed Heather was absorbed in it.

When it was over she clapped politely and turned to me. “He teaches math. He’s a very nice guy. He and Stu were friends since Harvard. He’s a gay math teacher and nobody knows it and he doesn’t want anybody to know it. He’s quite poor and quite dedicated to his students. He coaches soccer, heads up the computer program, and he emphatically does not fool around with the boys, and I don’t want to say anything else about him.”

“Yeah, I understand that,” I said. “But he might be in danger, you know.”

“You think…?”

“I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I can’t help feeling that if what happened to Stu was related to drugs—or his being gay, for that matter—then this guy ought to be warned.”

“I never thought of that,” she said. She frowned and then leaned across the table toward me. “Hey, Brady?” she said in a low voice.

“Yes.”

“C’mere,” she whispered.

I leaned toward her. She touched my face. “Please kiss me.”

I complied, intending a brief touching of lips. But she held it, her hand against my jaw, with an urgency that I didn’t reciprocate.