Vulgar Boatman (19 page)

I looked helplessly at Sylvie. Tears ran down her cheeks, whether from pain or anger or humiliation I couldn’t tell. “Do not hurt him,” she said hoarsely.

“I’m okay,” I managed to say, although I was sure I didn’t look it, the way the blood continued to drip onto the front of my shirt from my poor nose.

“Well, Mr. Coyne? What do you say?” The fat man was panting, from the combination of exertion and sexual arousal, I judged.

“What are you after?”

The skinny guy was holding the muzzle of his gun against the back of my neck. I figured he’d enjoy using it. So I had to watch as Mr. Curry grabbed the neckline of Sylvie’s dress and ripped it down, exposing both of her breasts.

“Hey, look,” said the thin man with the gun. “Bare tits. She ain’t got on any underwear.”

I felt the muscles in my shoulders and back tense. The fat man took one of Sylvie’s nipples between his thumb and forefinger and manipulated it experimentally. Suddenly he squeezed it hard. Sylvie screamed. I half rose in my chair, and Mr. Baron tapped me square on the top of my head with the butt of his gun. The pain shot straight down to my rectum.

I was drenched with sweat. My muscles were drained of strength. I could only slump there and watch as Mr. Curry’s fat hand reached down to the hem of Sylvie’s dress and lifted it up. “My heavens, look at this,” he chortled.

From behind me I heard the skinny man’s lewd laugh. “Blonde, by crackey!” he said.

The fat man’s red suety face was all bunched up so that it looked like a ball of uncooked hamburg. His fingers moved over Sylvie’s thighs and bare belly.

“How about my turn?” said the man with the gun.

“We shall take turns, Mr. Baron,” said the fat one, his bulk shaking at the humor of it all. “I shall go first.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I said wait. I’ll give you what you want. I have it.”

“An intelligent young man after all.”

“Take your hands off the lady.”

“Not until we have what we came for, sir.”

“It’s in the other room.”

“Where?” said the skinny one.

“I can get it.”

Mr. Curry jerked his head at Mr. Baron. “Okay. Go with him.”

“It’s just in the bedroom,” I said.

I felt the gun barrel prod at my kidneys. “Let’s go, asshole.”

I limped slowly into my bedroom, flipped on the light switch, and went to the corner where my Harlan Fiske Stone briefcase stood. I pointed to it. “It’s in there,” I told Mr. Baron.

“Pick it up,” he said.

I reached down and grabbed the leather handle.

“Bring it out.”

I lugged the briefcase back into the kitchen. Sylvie and Mr. Curry seemed to have arrived at a kind of stalemate. He had let the hem of her dress drop, and he was fondling her bare left breast mechanically, kneading it as if it were a wad of pizza dough, while Sylvie sagged back against him, her eyes closed, her mouth set in a grimace of resignation.

I hefted the briefcase onto the table. “Now will you let her go?” I said to the fat man.

Mr. Baron stood across the table from me, facing me, his gun pointing at my chest. Mr. Curry remained at my left, still holding Sylvie.

“We’ll have to see what you have for us, first,” he said. His hand remained on Sylvie’s breast.

“It’s in the briefcase.”

“Take it out,” said Mr. Curry.

“Hang on,” said the man with the gun. “I’ll do that.”

I shrugged.

“No,” said Mr. Curry. “I want him to do it. Slowly, now Mr. Coyne.”

I unsnapped the top of the old briefcase, pulled open the accordion top, and leaned over to peer down into it. Then I reached my hand in. There was a stack of papers on top. Drafts of the contract for the young couple who wanted to have a baby. I snaked my hand under them until I felt the cold steel of my Smith and Wesson .38. The way it lay in the bottom of the briefcase, the barrel was aiming toward me. I felt for the handle, found it, and tried to turn the gun around.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Mr. Baron.

I leaned over the briefcase again, and pretended to look around. “It’s in an envelope,” I said.

“Just dump everything on the table.”

“No, wait. I got it,” I said. I held the revolver by its grip. My thumb found the hammer. I held my breath as I double-cocked it. The click was inaudible from inside the heavy leather briefcase. I barely touched the trigger. It had always been set too light for me. The report was muffled by the briefcase. It sounded like the cherry bombs we used to explode inside mailboxes when we were kids.

Mr. Baron looked surprised. His eyebrows went up. He lifted his gun slowly. Then he dropped it. His mouth opened, as if he were about to sing the opening lines of the national anthem. No words came out. Instead came a gurgling noise, followed by a rush of blood.

A red splotch spread across the front of his windbreaker. Mr. Baron stood there, looking surprised. Then he fell backwards.

Mr. Curry, considering his bulk, reacted with an athlete’s reflexes. He shoved Sylvie at me, and I instinctively reached to catch her. But one of my hands still held my Smith and Wesson, which had become entangled inside the briefcase, so that when Sylvie hit me I fell sideways onto the floor, bringing Sylvie, the briefcase, and the revolver with me.

Mr. Curry ran for the door. I scrambled out from under Sylvie and wrenched the gun from the briefcase. Mr. Curry was at the door, not hesitating, yanking at the knob. I leveled the gun at him as he pulled the door open.

“Stop right there!” I yelled, squinting down the barrel at Mr. Curry’s fat back.

He didn’t pause. He opened the door, skittered out, and slammed the door behind him. I lowered the gun.

I sat there on the floor stupidly, staring down at the gun. Sylvie moved beside me. She put her hand on the back of my neck. “Why didn’t you shoot that man?”

“I couldn’t shoot a man, Sylvie.”

“But you did.”

“My God,” I said. I stood up and sprinted out of my apartment. I stopped in the corridor, looking one way and then the other. I checked the elevator. According to the light, it was at the lobby. I went to the stairwell. I neither saw nor heard anything.

The fat man had gotten away.

I returned to my apartment. I phoned down to Hector in the lobby. He hadn’t noticed anybody either entering a while earlier or having just left. I told him to watch out for a fat guy, probably the same one he had seen the night Buddy was killed. Hector was apologetic, and expressed great enthusiasm for helping.

I went over to where the thin man who called himself Mr. Baron lay on my kitchen floor. He was on his back, his arms outthrust, his legs spread. The front of his windbreaker gleamed wetly with the blood that had not yet begun to dry. His eyes stared at the ceiling. His open mouth was red, and his chin and lips were stained bloody.

I put my ear to his mouth and then felt for a pulse in his neck. I turned to Sylvie, who hadn’t moved. “He’s dead.”

She nodded. “Good.”

“Are you all right?”

“I am all right. My breast is sore. That is all.”

“Let me find you something to put on,” I said.

She looked down at the front of her ruined dress. “Yes, please. I am very cold.”

I went to her and hugged her close against me. I could feel her shake and twitch. “I was so frightened,” she mumbled against my chest. Her entire body began to shudder. I squeezed her tight. I could feel her fingernails dig into my back.

“Me, too,” I whispered. “I was very frightened.”

She clung to me, heaving and shivering. I smoothed her hair against her head and moved my hand in small circles on her back and kissed her forehead and cheeks, and gradually she began to relax. She pulled her head back and looked up at me. Her face was wet and her eyes were red and swollen.

“I am very glad you killed that son of a bitch,” she hissed. “But I wish you had killed the other one, too.”

“We’ll get him.”

I helped her into the living room and sat her on the sofa. She hugged herself and pressed her knees together. “Sit tight,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”

I went into my bedroom and found an old flannel bathrobe hanging from a hook in the back of the closet. I brought it out and sat beside Sylvie. I put my arms across her shoulders, urging her to lean forward so that I could drape the robe around her. She cooperated passively. She was staring in the direction of the skinny man I had killed.

I found a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Then I went to the phone and dialed the police emergency number. Miraculously, I was not instructed to hold, please, and I was able to instruct the woman on the other end how to find my apartment. I made her understand that it contained a corpse, that it was I who had created this corpse, and that I would wait with it for the police to arrive.

She made me repeat it all, which I did. Then I told her to tell State Police Detective Horowitz what had happened, that he would want to know.

I went back to the kitchen, stepping carefully over Mr. Baron’s body, and took down a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I poured two tumblers one-third full. I took one over to Sylvie and handed it to her. She accepted it and looked up at me.

“Do you want to toast something?” she said, trying to smile and not making it.

“To life,” I said.

We touched glasses. I took a large swig into my mouth, let it roll around for a moment, and swallowed it. Tears came briefly to my eyes. Sylvie took a big gulp, coughed, then sipped again.

“This is better,” she said.

The police got there in ten or fifteen minutes. Their arrival was heralded by a call from Hector. He said into the intercom, “More problems, huh, Mr. Coyne?”

“You sure you didn’t see anything, Hector?”

“I see nothing. I’m sorry again, Mr. Coyne. The police, they are on their way, now. They wanna talk to me again, probably, huh?”

“Probably,” I said.

A minute later there was a knock at the door. “It’s open,” I yelled.

Horowitz was accompanied by eight or ten cops, two in plainclothes, the rest uniformed, some city, some state. He glanced briefly at the dead body on the kitchen floor, then came over to where Sylvie and I were sitting. He looked down at us and smiled.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“Hey, are you okay there?” he said.

I touched my finger to my nose. “It’s busted,” I said. “Again. And it’s not funny.”

“It looks funny,” said Horowitz. He wore the same blue bow tie he had on the other time he had been in my apartment. He still shifted a wad of bubble gum from one cheek to the other as he talked. “We’ll get it looked at if you want. We ought to talk first, though.” He turned his attention to Sylvia. “How about you, Miss? Are you injured?”

“I am all right,” she whispered.

Horowitz cocked his head and frowned at her. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “Okay, then. What I’m going to do, if you don’t mind, I’m going to separate you two. Nothing personal here, but we do want to hear the stories separately. Get all the details that way. Understand?”

I nodded. Sylvie said, “Yes.”

Horowitz called a young black cop wearing a freshly pressed suit, which I estimated cost him a week’s pay. He came over. “Interrogate the lady, All, will you?”

“Certainly,” said the cop.

“Come on,” said Horowitz to me. “Let’s move over there.”

We went to the other side of the room and sat in a pair of soft chairs. “Okay, Mr. Coyne,” said Horowitz. “Let’s have it.”

“These two clowns were waiting here when the lady and I got home. Must’ve been around eleven.”

“Two?”

“Yes. That one—” I waved in the direction of the dead man “—and a fat guy. He got away. They called themselves Mr. Baron—he’s the skinny one over there—and Mr. Curry.”

“You say they were here when you got home. Inside, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“How’d they get in?”

“A key. I guess they got the key that Buddy used.”

“The boy who was killed here, you mean. The Baron boy.”

“Right. They’re the ones who killed him.”

Horowitz frowned. “So you never did change that lock.”

“I guess I forgot.”

“Describe the fat one for me. The one who called himself Mr. Curry, who got away. What’d he look like?”

I did the best I could, including the faint traces of a Southern drawl and the way he called me “suh.” When I finished, Horowitz excused himself. He went over and talked to one of the uniformed policemen. As he talked, he kept glancing back at me, as if he was worried I might try to escape. The policeman went to the telephone. Horowitz came back and sat beside me.

“We’re getting a description out. See what we come up with. It seems to match the one your night man gave us of the guy who was here that other time. He’s on his way up. See if he can ID that sack of bones on your kitchen floor.” He blew a bubble. “Okay, now, Mr. Coyne. Tell me how the shooting went.”

So I did, as well as I could reconstruct it. Horowitz listened carefully, interrupting frequently for clarification and detail. When I finished, he said, “So what were they after?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“No clue?”

“Maybe a clue,” I said. So I told him what Christie Ayers had told me about stealing Alice Sylvester’s school records and giving them to Buddy.

“You think these two creeps would kill a boy over a dead girl’s school records?” said Horowitz.

“I have no idea. It’s the only clue I have.”

“Why would they think you’d have it, assuming it’s what they were after?”

“There was this article in the paper this morning…”

Horowitz grinned. “I read it. You think all those ‘no comments’ would do it?”

“Maybe. Combine that with the fact that Buddy came here after he got those records from Christie. Logical to assume they were here. Or that Buddy had told me about them.”

Horowitz looked doubtful. “Maybe,” he said. He blew an enormous bubble, which he pinched between his thumb and forefinger to break. It reminded me of how Mr. Curry had pinched Sylvie’s nipple, and the look of pain on her face.

Horowitz took his gum from his mouth, rolled it in his fingers, and looked around. His eyes lit on an ashtray, which was mounded with dead cigarettes butts. He dropped the gum on top. “Far as they know,” he finally said, gazing across the room through my glass doors at the view of the night sky, “whatever they were after, you still got. Right?”