Marine Corpse (9 page)

“I’m sorry to hear it. Time heals all.”

“Oh, it’s not that. It’s you.”

“It’s me?”

“I
want
that condominium. I do not want that Semitic bitch living in our place, and I do not intend to sit by and have that happen, regardless of what you may think. Or perhaps I misunderstood Benjamin.”

“No, Meriam. You didn’t misunderstand him. He pays me for my best advice. My best advice here is to forget any claim on the condominium. It belongs to Heather Kriegel, whether we like it or not.”

“We emphatically do not like it, Brady. And I should remind you that it’s the family that pays you, not Benjamin, and if you ask me, I think we’re paying you too damn much to tell us not to do anything. Now you listen to me, Brady Coyne. I want you to pursue this thing. Do you hear me?”

I took a deep breath. “Meriam, I do hear you. I can only repeat to you what I told Ben. There is no case here. If you insist on pursuing it, we will lose.”

“Well, you just make a case. We employ you to do our legal business, not to sit on your fanny collecting a fat retainer. So do it.” She hung up abruptly.

“Go to hell, Meriam,” I said to nobody in particular, replacing the receiver on the hook.

I stared out my window, trying to recapture that scene in Alaska, when the intercom buzzed again. I picked it up. “What now?” I said.

“Oh, boy,” said Julie. “Excuse me if I do my job.”

“Sorry, kid. What is it?”

I heard her expel her breath quickly. I could picture her rolling her eyes in exasperation. “It’s a Ms. Kriegel. It’s probably not important.”

“Put her on.”

“She’s got a sexy voice.”

“Oh, really?”

“Another big case, eh, Counselor?”

“All cases are important. Justice, you know, is blind.”

“Justice ain’t the only one,” said my secretary. “Just a sec.”

There was a click in my ear, and I said, “Hi, Heather.”

“That was nice the other night,” she said.

“You
do
have a sexy voice.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Thank you for saying that. I wasn’t sure if…”

“Aha. You
were
feeling guilty. I thought so, the way you snuck away so quickly. Did you really have an appointment?”

“Well, I…”

“I knew it,” she said. I heard her laugh. “I got the picture, Brady. Sex-starved young thing, all helpless and vulnerable and on the rebound, poor baby, and along comes this brutish fellow to take carnal advantage. No better than rape, eh? Wham, bam. A tidy little seduction, and then the guilt comes on quick and hard, doesn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, Heather.”

“When you’re done punishing yourself can we talk?”

“It was too quick,” I said. “That’s not the way to start a relationship.”

“I personally thought it was a hell of a way to start a relationship. It was just fine. I liked it a lot. I want to do it some more.”

I fumbled for a cigarette. “Look,” I said, after I got it lit. “I think we should start over again.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Prime rib at Finnerty’s. And there’s a little place that has good jazz on Route 9 in Framingham. Do you like jazz?”

“I adore Oscar Peterson. I play his records all the time. It’s not bombastic enough to accompany my exercising, though. What’ll we do after the jazz?”

“By then,” I said, “I’ll probably have worked off most of my guilt. How’s Friday night?”

“Jeez, I’ve got this really busy schedule. Let me check.” She hesitated for about three counts. “Hey, it looks like I can squeeze it in.”

“Good. I’ll pick you up.”

“The reason I called…”

“Oh. There was another reason?”

“Yes. The reason I called was that I’ve gone through all those notebooks of Stu’s, and there seem to be several missing. I wondered if you forgot to bring them with you, or if you were keeping them for some reason.”

“No, I don’t have any others. What you see is what there is.”

“Hm,” she murmured. “It’s kinda weird. One of them is completely blank. And in some of the others, there are places where Stu seems to be alluding to a diary, as if it were something different from the notebooks. Does that make any sense to you?”

“There was an old guy who used to bring me the notebooks every Monday. I figured that one time Stu just had nothing to write, but wanted to keep his friend in business. I always bought him lunch and gave him money when he brought the notebooks to my office. So Stu gave him a blank notebook.”

“Altoona? Was that his name?”

“Yes.”

“Stu wrote about him a lot. Brady, there’s nothing at all for the last week.”

“The week before he died.”

“Yes. And there’s this diary he talked about.”

“I don’t know anything about a diary.”

“Oh, well.” She paused. “It’s just that I have a feeling he wrote lots of other stuff. I’d like to have it.”

“This is the very gentlest of hints, Heather.”

“I don’t know what I expect you to do. But…”

“I could go talk with Altoona, I suppose. I think I know where to find him.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “I should look him up anyway. He’s a nice old guy who’s pretty sick, and I’d like to buy him lunch again. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do since Stu died.”

“And you could ask him about the other notebooks, or the diary?”

“Sure. I could do that.”

“Will you be able to do it before Friday?”

“Are you suggesting some sort of
quid pro quo
here?”

“Absolutely not. What do you think I am?”

“I really haven’t figured that out yet, Heather. I’m pretty sure I know what you’re not, though. And I do look forward to working on that puzzle some more.”

“It might be fun, at that.”

“Friday, then.”

“Friday,” she said.

After I hung up the phone, Julie tapped on my door and poked her head in. “Coffee, boss?”

I looked into my mug. Aside from the coating of black sludge on the bottom, it was empty. “I can get it,” I said.

She came to my desk and picked up the mug. My younger son, Joey, had constructed it for me in a junior high school ceramics class several years earlier. It was a little lopsided, and there were finger marks baked into the sides. Julie looked into it and said, “Yuck!”

“Don’t you dare use soap on it,” I said. “It ruins the taste.”

“Not a chance. You don’t mind if I rinse it lightly, do you?”

“If you feel you must. I’m just getting it properly broken in. When you come back you can tell me what it is you want to tell me.”

“What makes you think I want to tell you something?”

“When else do you fetch me coffee?”

“Righto,” she said, and she twirled away. I noted again how marvelously well her body had withstood the rigors of childbirth.

She was back in a minute with coffee for both of us. She took the chair beside my desk. “This is the point at which you light a cigarette, I believe,” she said.

I did. “I’m bracing myself,” I said. “What is it? Some Harvard Law School type offering to double your wages? Edward getting transferred to Santa Monica? My God, you’re not pregnant again, are you?”

Julie raised her mug to her mouth and peered at me over the rim. “It’s not me, Brady. It’s you. You’ve done it again, haven’t you?”

“Probably,” I said. “Give me another hint.”

“Don’t play dumb with me. You haven’t done any work for the past two days. You cancelled your appointment with Mrs. Bailey and then sat in here staring out the window all morning dreaming about trout. I gave you those letters to sign yesterday, and I can see them still sitting there.”

I puffed on my Winston. “I’ve had some things on my mind,” I muttered.

“Who is she, Brady?”

“Who is who?”

“The new girlie?”

“Oh,” I said. “Look. It’s not the way it seems.”

She nodded and grinned.

“Well,” I said, “I guess it is the way it seems. If it’ll make you feel any better, I’m not particularly happy about it.”

“That,” she said, “is a vast relief to me. At the risk of sounding overly maternal, may I remind you that you are forty-something years old. You have two practically grown sons, an ex-wife whom you still love, if the truth were known, and who still loves you, as you know. You’ve got a lucrative little law practice, a devoted—and rather skilled—secretary, and clients, bless them, who actually regard you as a responsible and competent adult. You know a number of mature women with whom you share warm and hassle-free relationships.”

“I know all that,” I said miserably.

“I’m not an attorney,” she continued. “I got a lousy BA in art history, for God’s sake.”

“And you’ve been doing all my work.”

“Aw, that’s not it, Brady. I just hate to see you miserable again, that’s all.”

“But I’m
not
miserable. I’m…”

“You will be.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. “It usually does end up that way, doesn’t it?”

“It
always
does.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“I’m not giving you any advice. I don’t have any advice. If I did, you wouldn’t listen to me, anyway. I’m just warning you that I can’t represent your clients in court.”

“And you don’t like to see me miserable, because you love me.”

She reached across the desk and touched my cheek. “You got it, big guy. Watch yourself. Okay?”

“It’s all your fault, you know.”

“What sort of twisted logic allows you to say that?”

“You turned me down.”

“Best thing that ever happened to either of us,” she said.

“I know, I know.” I blew a kiss into my hand and touched it to her face. “Thanks for your concern. I’ll try to do better around here.”

She nodded and stood up. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here.”

“Thanks.”

She headed for the door. “Her name is Heather Kriegel,” I called to Julie.

“I figured that out already,” she answered without turning around. “That was easy.”

I
FOUND THE ST
.
MICHAEL’S
mission on one of the narrow little side streets that connects lower Tremont with Washington, not too far from City Hospital. It was a brisk twenty-minute walk from my office in Copley Square, where Trinity and Old South Church reign benignly in the shadows of the John Hancock Tower and the Prudential Building and the new Westin Hotel.

It was, as the kids say, a walk into a whole ’nother world.

The smudged brick buildings seemed to lean in over the deserted street, casting it into perpetual shadow. Their facades were decorated with spray-painted greetings, most of them variations on the “fuck you” theme. Here and there a parked car huddled under a shroud of gray snow, plowed in for the winter. If there were sidewalks against the buildings, the city had failed to clear them.

I walked the length of the narrow street once, then doubled back and examined the buildings more closely. The second time by I found a small hand-lettered sign beside a doorway that read, “St. Michael’s.” I mounted the three cracked concrete steps. An index card tacked over the bell beside the solid door announced, “Clinic open 10–12 Tues. Wed. & Fri.” I rang the bell.

It was two or three minutes before the door opened and a slim man with a fox face and pointed black beard peered out at me. I guessed he was in his middle thirties. He looked me up and down, decided, I supposed, that I wasn’t a homeless waif, and said, “Yes?”

The clerical collar he wore under his green plaid shirt assured me I had the right man. “Father,” I said, “my name is Brady Coyne. I’m an attorney. I wonder if I might speak with you for a minute.”

He frowned. “Don’t I…?”

“Yes. I phoned you some time ago.”

“Altoona, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come on in, Mr. Coyne.”

He opened the door and stepped back. I entered into a dark, narrow hallway, which opened on the right onto a long room filled with rows of rectangular tables. Several closed doors lined the hallway. A couple of men stood leaning against the wall outside the closed doors.

“You picked a good time,” said the priest, gesturing me into what I figured was the dining room. “Dr. Vance is just finishing up in the clinic. He won’t be needing me anymore this morning. The men’ll be queuing up for lunch in an hour or so.” He motioned me to take one of the mismatched chairs. It creaked and complained as I gingerly perched upon it. He pulled a folding metal chair up close to me. “Not that comfortable, is it? Salvation Army special. The price was right. I’m Joe Barrone. Call me Joe.”

He leaned toward me and held out his hand, and we shook quickly. His hand was dry and bony, but his grip was firm. “Father,” I said, feeling awkward about calling a priest “Joe,” “I’m looking for Altoona. I haven’t seen him in a while. Is he still staying here?”

He sighed and crossed his legs. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots with elevated heels. “Why? What’s the problem?”

“No problem, really. We had a mutual friend—a man by the name of Stu Carver. He was killed a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t seen Altoona since then. I wanted to ask him a few questions. I also wanted to see how he’s doing. I got to know him pretty well, I thought, and I’ve been concerned about him.”

The priest frowned. “Stu Carver, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Should I have known him? Was he one of our, er, patrons?”

“He went by the name Cutter, I think.”

He nodded. “Oh, sure. Altoona had him in a few times. Young fellow. An outsider.”

“How do you mean?”

He chuckled. “These men, they’re private, cliquey types, you know. Not what you’d call sociable. Get a bunch of them in this room, you’d hardly hear a word passed in an evening. But this Cutter, he was different. He’d go around introducing himself, asking questions. Trying to be friendly, I guess. But, of course, they didn’t trust him. One evening—it was one of the times he stayed the night—he sat with the Puerto Ricans chattering away in Spanish at them. They just looked at him with their stone faces. Another time it was the blacks. Same thing. Altoona, I think, tried to tell him how it was. These are troubled people who don’t like themselves very much. They’re defeated. Running away from life. Losing themselves in a bottle. They want to forget their past. They don’t want to think about their future. All those clichés are really apt. Anyway, someone like this Cutter sticks out like a sore thumb. Makes them uncomfortable, wary. He was just too interested in things. I remember hearing about his death.” He paused. “He wasn’t really a bum, was he?”