Vulgar Boatman (17 page)

I looked at my watch. It was a little after five. “How long did she say she’d wait?”

“You better call her,” said Julie. “She said she’d wait forever if she had to. It sounded like she was agitated.”

“Christie, Christie…,” I mumbled, shaking my head at my alcohol-fuddled memory.

“She did sound kind of sexy,” said Julie.

“And she’d wait forever, huh? Well, I guess I better call her.”

I
WENT INTO MY
office. In the precise center of my blotter, squared with the corners, was Julie’s note with the name “Christie” on it and a phone number. “You want to call this one,” Julie had noted. “She sounds eager.”

My secretary knew the difference between eager and anxious, so I was surprised at the distinct anxiety I heard in the voice that answered halfway through the second ring. “Mr. Coyne,” she said when she picked up the phone. “Is that you?”

“It is I,” I replied, with the careful attention to grammatical exactitude I typically employ when I am in the process of sobering up. “You are Christie?”

“Are you the same Mr. Coyne who was in the paper this morning? The one who knew Buddy Baron?”

“The same. And you—”

“Were you the guy who came to school a week or so ago? That I saw with Dr. Larsen and Mr. Speer?”

“Yes. That was me.” So much for good grammar.

“I heard Mr. Speer on the phone use your name.” She paused, as if she didn’t know what to say next.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m—I need to talk to somebody.”

“Tell me your last name, Christie.”

“Oh. It’s Christie Ayers. Look. Listen to me. I’m really like nervous here, Mr. Coyne. Can I talk to you?”

“About what?”

“About Buddy and Alice and stuff.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“I really don’t want to do this on the phone. I was just hoping you could meet me somewhere.”

“Of course. Where are you now?”

“Look. There’s a little ice cream shop over in Essex. Shirley and Joe’s. It not far from here. No one knows me there. I’ve got my folks’ car. I really need to talk to somebody. I’m kinda scared, truthfully. I can’t think of anybody else.”

“You haven’t talked to anybody? What about your parents? Somebody at school? The police?”

“You don’t understand. I’ll try to explain. Will you come? Please?”

I said I would, and she gave me directions to the place in Essex.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

“No. Make it seven-thirty. I’ve gotta—you know, set it up. With my folks.”

“Fine,” I said. “Just be careful.”

“Anyway,” she said, after I repeated her directions back to her, “you’ve got some ideas about who killed Buddy, huh?”

“What makes you say that?”

“That thing in the paper. When you wouldn’t comment. That’s like a hint, right? That’s the way the cops do when they’re just about ready to arrest some guy. They say, ‘No comment.’”

“Christie, you can’t believe everything you read.”

“Whatever that’s supposed to mean,” she said.

After we hung up, I called Sylvie, who was now back in town. “Time to redeem that raincheck on monkfish,” I said.

“Do you promise this time?”

“I promise.”

I swung around to Sylvie’s condo, double-parked on Beacon Street, and went in to get her. She buzzed me up, and when I got to her door I rapped lightly on it. She opened it a crack, gave me a green-eyed grin, unlatched the chain, and let me in. She was wearing one of those frilly little one-piece undergarments like Frederick’s of Hollywood advertises in the backs of magazines. A teddy, I believe it’s called. She put both arms around my neck and kissed me.

I reached up and gripped her arms. She pulled her head back to look at me. It caused her body to press harder against mine. “Not in the mood?” She smirked.

“It’s amazing how the mood can unexpectedly come over a man.”

She rotated her pelvis against me. “You,” she said, “are in the mood.”

“But I am also double-parked. And on a tight schedule. Throw something on, huh?”

She stepped back, stuck her tongue out at me, and disappeared into her bedroom. She emerged no more than two minutes later wearing a lime-green dress that picked up the color of her eyes. It had a scoop neck. She wore a single, thin gold chain around her neck. The heart-shaped pendant that dangled from it created the effect of an arrow pointing to her cleavage. Not that any arrow was needed.

She twirled around. “Like it?”

I nodded. “Not bad.”

“Finish the zip.”

She put her back to me and I zipped up her dress. I suspected she had managed to zip herself all the way up all by herself many times. She picked up her purse and a cream-colored jacket and said, “I’m ready. For anything.”

When we got into the car, which miraculously had been neither tagged nor towed, I said, “Are you still wearing that little underwear thing?”

“My teddy?” She giggled. “No.”

When we pulled into the parking garage under my apartment fifteen minutes later, Sylvie said, “I took it off.”

“Huh?”

“My teddy. I took it off. It makes lines.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

We stopped at my place only long enough for me to exchange the herringbone suit for a pair of gray corduroy slacks and a Harris tweed sportcoat. Then we were back in the car and crossing over the Tobin Bridge, headed for Essex.

When we pulled onto Route 128, I said to Sylvie, “Are you naked under that dress?”

She touched the hair at the back of my neck. “We are all naked under our clothes, aren’t we?”

Later, after we left the highway and were following a secondary road according to the directions Christie Ayers had given me, I said, “Dammit anyway, Sylvie. This is unfair.”

“What is unfair?”

“Not wearing underwear.”

“Does it show?”

“That’s not the point. I know.”

I pulled into the gravel parking lot of the little place called Shirley and Joe’s. It was a low-slung shingled affair. A tidal inlet wandered through a marsh out back. There were half a dozen cars parked in the lot. I shut off the ignition and turned to Sylvie. While I was kissing her I ran my hand experimentally over her hip. Damned if she hadn’t been telling the truth. No lines at all.

Shirley and Joe’s was a pizza-hamburger-hot fudge sundae sort of place. Two walls lined with booths, a counter with a dozen stools, and an old-fashioned jukebox. To my delight, the song it was playing was an oldie by Pat Boone. Not that I liked Pat Boone especially. But all the contemporary alternatives were so much worse.

I blinked and looked around and saw a hand wave from one of the booths. I took Sylvie by the elbow and steered her over.

Christie Ayers looked vaguely familiar to me. When she lost her baby fat and decided how to handle her brown hair, which presently was allowed to hang in undisciplined strings around her ears and over her forehead, she might be pretty.

She wore a baggy blue sweatshirt with WHHS on it and too much green eyeshadow. She smiled nervously and motioned for me and Sylvie to sit across from her.

In this place Sylvie managed to be to both overdressed and underdressed at the same time.

“Well,” said Christie, brushing the hair away from her eyes, “I’m Christie, in case you didn’t figure it out. I know you’re Mr. Coyne. You were at school.”

“This is Sylvie Szabo,” I said.

“Oh, hi. You’re very beautiful.”

Sylvie smiled. “Thank you.”

“Christie,” I began.

“You want something? Milk shake, sundae, like that? I’m gonna have a milk shake.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I remember now. You were in the computer room. The teacher—Speer, right?—was helping you.”

A teenage boy wearing a white jacket stained liberally with pizza sauce and chocolate ice cream, his lips barely closing over a mouthful of braces, came over to us with a pencil poised above a pad. He frowned at the pad and mumbled, “Can I get you something?”

“Strawberry milk shake,” said Christie.

Sylvie elbowed me in the ribs. “Brady promised monkfish.”

“Not here,” I said.

“Tea, please, then,” said Sylvie. “With lemon.”

“I’ll just have coffee,” I said.

The boy took meticulous notes, then looked up and said, “That’s it?”

“Thank you,” I said. When he walked away, I said to Christie, “Okay, then. What’s on your mind?”

She stared at her hands, which lay on top of the table picking at each other. “I’m kinda nervous about this, to tell you the truth,” she said without looking up. “My friends call me Christie Airhead. You know? Ayers? Airhead? They think it’s funny.” She appealed with her eyes to Sylvie. “It’s not fair. But, jeez, I feel like an airhead right now. This was really dumb.”

Sylvie reached across and patted her busy hands. “It’s all right,” she said. “Brady is a very good attorney. He will help you. You must relax. And stop doing that to your nails.”

Christie stared at Sylvie. Then she smiled and nodded. She turned to me. “See, I stole something. That’s why I can’t talk to anybody.”

“What did you steal?”

“Something at school. I mean, if my parents knew they’d kill me. Literally. And obviously I can’t tell anybody at school. So I thought of you, naturally.”

I shrugged. “Naturally.”

“I mean, you being Buddy’s lawyer and all.”

“This isn’t all that clear to me, Christie. What did you steal?”

“A file. Alice Sylvester’s file.”

“Her records, you mean.”

“Right. Her file. If they find out, I’ll get bounced. I don’t need that. I’m just starting to get my act together, you know?”

I nodded. “Why don’t you just tell me the whole thing. It’s okay.”

Christie glanced at Sylvie, who nodded to her. Then she looked at me. “From the beginning, you mean?”

“Yes. From the beginning.”

“Well, okay.” Her fingers began nibbling at each other again. “See, Alice and I were best friends. Were, I mean, up until the beginning of school this year. Before that, well, I guess we hung out together about all the time. She was real nice to me. Alice was so popular and pretty, and, well, I was sort of a loser, actually. It was flattering to me that she seemed to like me. She would tell me stuff—about boys, and what she did. Stuff she wouldn’t tell to anybody else. Like she really trusted me. Alice did a lot of things I never did, believe me. Not that she was really wild or anything. Not then. It’s just, she went to parties and everything. Stuff I never did. I don’t want you to get me wrong, Mr. Coyne. I’m not saying Alice did bad things.”

She looked up with her eyebrows arched, asking for understanding. I nodded to her.

“Anyway, she changed right after school started up in September. She started ignoring me, for one thing. She even said rude things to me. Told me to get lost, only not like that, if you know what I mean. And she started skipping classes. I know she wasn’t doing any homework. And she was treating Buddy real bad.”

“What about Buddy?”

“Oh, well, she was going with him. She had been since last spring some time. Her parents were like bullshit about it—pardon my French—but Alice didn’t care. I mean, she did care, back at the beginning. She cared about her parents, I mean. But she really loved Buddy. She’d tell me what a nice boy he was, polite with her and all, how he respected her, and how sometimes she’d feel all sexy with him and it was Buddy who’d stop.” Christie stopped and frowned at me. “This is just stuff she told me, Mr. Coyne. I mean, I don’t really know…”

“That’s fine. Keep going.”

“Anyway, all that changed around the time school started. Like real suddenly. She was different to Buddy, different to me. Even to her parents. They called me once, asking me, like, what’s the matter with Alice? I didn’t know. What could I tell them? I didn’t figure it out until later.”

“Crack,” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t figure it out until I read something about it, and I looked at all the symptoms, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Alice,’ I said. So I went to her. I told her. I said, you’re killing yourself, what are you doing, we all love you, you gotta get help, look at yourself. She laughed at me. She told me to—to get lost, if you follow me. I talked to Buddy about it. He wouldn’t believe me. He said she was just moody, she was nervous about college, had a lot of things on her mind, stuff like that. I mean, after everything Buddy went through, you’d think he’d be smarter. Now that I think about it, though, I think maybe he really did believe me, deep down inside of him. He just couldn’t admit it. Because of his own problems. Anyway—”

The boy with the braces brought our order. Christie stirred her milk shake with a straw until he went away.

“Anyway,” she continued, “then Alice died. I mean, okay, she was murdered. Wow, it’s hard to even say it. And if you think I know who killed her or something, well, I don’t. That’s not it. Anyway, a few days after that I get this call from Buddy. He wants me to go into a cabinet and steal Alice’s file. He tells me exactly where to go, when to go there, what to do. All of it. He says it’s because he’s figuring out who killed her, see, and if I was really her best friend I’d do this for him. For Alice.”

Christie dipped and sucked on her straw. Then she looked up at me and shrugged. “So I did it. Just the way he said. Alice’s guidance counselor leaves her door unlocked when she goes to the teachers’ cafeteria for lunch. Same time every day. It was simple, just like Buddy said. Each kid has a folder with all kinds of stuff in it. Alphabetical. I just pulled open the drawer and found S and there was Sylvester, right near the end next to T. I took it and put it under my jacket, just like Buddy said.”

“How did you get it to Buddy?”

She grinned. “I met him right here, at Shirley and Joe’s. That same night. He called me at home around supper. I told him I got it. So we met here. In the parking lot, actually. He wouldn’t come in. He said he didn’t want anybody to see him. I figure he was trying to protect me, don’t you think? I mean, so nobody would see me with him.”

“That’s very possible,” I said.

“So I gave him Alice’s file, with all the stuff in it.”

“Did he tell you what he was looking for in the file?”

She frowned. “No. When I gave it to him, he went through it, kind of holding it in front of him sort of half open and flipping through the papers. He found what he wanted, though.”