LCole 07 - Deadly Cove

by DuBois, Brendan

  I said, “But Paula…”

  “I know. Violence in her vicinity isn’t her job. I hope she snaps out of it. She’s busted my chops a few times, along with the department, but that is her job. I don’t wish her ill.”

  I could hear drawers and closet doors opening and closing upstairs. I said, “What do you know about the shooting?”

  “Know?” she asked. “As much as your average person on the street. Bronson Toles was giving a speech, there was a disruption on the stage, and boom. Hidden sniper in the nearby woods took off the top of his head. Sniper and rifle successfully escaped.”

  “Any idea of the rifle’s caliber?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I’ve heard, but my guess would probably be a .308 or something equally heavy.”

  “Who’s handling the investigation?”

  “Something like this? So damn newsworthy? You know it went right to the state police, with the attorney general’s office riding shotgun … and the Falconer cops doing what they can. Which, unfortunately for them, won’t be much in a case this big. They’ll probably be running down long-shot leads and fetching coffee and doughnuts.”

  “Do you know if they’ve recovered the slug that killed Toles?”

  Diane stared at me and said, “All right, didn’t you hear what I said before? I know about as much as the local citizen. The staties and the AG’s office have this one sewn up tight, tight, tight. Just because I’m a detective sergeant in Tyler doesn’t mean I have a pipeline into what’s going on.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Sorry to press you like that.”

  Diane cocked her head. “Seems like a lot of pointed questions for a thousand-word story that’s due to your editor today.”

  “It does, doesn’t it.”

  We sat there in silence for some long seconds. Upstairs a woman was whistling a tune I didn’t recognize. Diane crossed her arms and said, “What are you up to?”

  I waited, and then it just clicked, like something that had been in the back of my mind for days and was finally coming free. “I want to find out who the shooter is.”

  “So do a bunch of other guys and gals. Guys and gals who do this for a living and who carry firearms and nice shiny badges. What’s your excuse?”

  “The shooter hurt a friend of mine.”

  She gave me a cold smile. “Hurt? Hurt a friend of yours? Lewis, a husband and a stepdad and a hero to lots of our counterculture citizens had his head blown off in front of hundreds of people. That sort of killing gives law enforcement an enormous incentive to crack the case and find the shooter. What in the world do you think you can do that they can’t?”

  I rubbed my hands together. “Probably nothing, but I’ve got to make the effort.”

  Again the slight cock of her head. “For Paula, right?”

  “For Paula.”

  “Thought she had a man. The Tyler town counsel.”

  “She still does.”

  “And you and Annie are still together, right?”

  “We are,” I said. “In fact, she’s coming back here in a couple of days, so we can get reacquainted.”

  “Good for you.”

  Just then I heard the sound of footsteps coming down from upstairs, and Kara Miles, Diane’s significant other for quite a period of time, emerged. Her short dark hair was still wet, and she had on loose-fit jeans, a dark gray sweatshirt, and heavy boots; over one shoulder hung a bright red knapsack. Her face lit up, and she said, “Hey, Lewis. Good to see you.”

  I stood up, and so did Diane. “Good to see you, too, Kara.”

  Diane smiled, but it looked to be a forced expression. Her hands were in both of her jean pockets, and the air seemed to crackle a bit, as if I were near an electrical generator that wasn’t working right. Kara looked at Diane and Diane looked at Kara, and Kara said, “Well, I’m off.”

  Diane said, “I’ll see you out.”

  Kara shifted her knapsack from one shoulder to another. “You don’t have to.”

  “I don’t mind,” Diane said, and Kara turned and went down the stairs, Diane following her, and I stayed behind, my arms and feet suddenly feeling like they had swollen twice their size, making me feel awkward and out of place. There was a low murmur of voices, a pause, a sharper exchange of voices, and then a door slamming. I waited. This condo had once been a happy place, with two loving women filling it up, and now it was something else, something I didn’t like.

  A voice from the bottom of the stairs. “Lewis?”

  “Yes?”

  “Go for a walk?”

  I checked a clock on the wall. Nearly eleven thirty, and it was at least a fifteen-minute drive home, and my Shoreline deadline for my new boss was at noon.

  I grabbed my jacket. “Love to.”

  * * *

  We walked in silence across the condo parking lot until we came to a dock that stretched out into Tyler Harbor. Diane kept pace with me and walked to the end of the dock, where she stood, looking out, and then sat down, and I joined her.

  “Look,” she finally said. “There’s my boat. See her?”

  I certainly did. The boat was a twenty-foot fiberglass Holder named Miranda, for the not-so-popular-among-some-cops official warning that they have to give each time they make an arrest. The sails were furled, and it was resting at anchor, maybe a hundred or so yards out. Moored to the dock was a rowboat that Diane used to get out to her when it was time for a sail. I said to Diane, “Sure, I see her.”

  “Notice anything odd about her?”

  I looked again. “Not a thing.”

  Diane sighed. “Look again. Then look at her neighbors.”

  So I did just that. I looked at Miranda again and then at the other boats, the moored lobster boats, stern draggers, and other fishing vessels. Then I saw what Diane was getting at.

  “She’s the last sailboat out there,” I said.

  Diane leaned back on the worn wooden planks of the pier, weight on her hands. “So true, my friend. The very last one out there. You see, Kara and I, we always had an end-of-the-summer ritual, one last long sail down to Cape Ann and back. So far, that hasn’t happened this year.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The usual. My schedule, her schedule, that sort of thing, and now the protest movement’s taking up all of her time … crap like that.”

  Out over the harbor the usual seagulls were doing their usual dance in the gray sky, and out beyond, the buildings of the Falconer nuclear power plant looked so quiet and peaceful. Hard to believe that there were thousands of people out there, in the woods and marshland, preparing for another march later today.

  I leaned into her a bit, my shoulder touching her shoulder. “What else is going on?”

  She turned to me, her eyes moist. “You’re spooky sometimes, you know that?”

  “It’s October. Time for Halloween. Seems appropriate.”

  “Hah.”

  Diane turned again so that she was looking out at the harbor, the moored vessels, the stretches of marshland. She took a deep breath. “Funny thing, isn’t it, that from here, you can practically see Massachusetts. Just about a mile or so away, the geography is pretty much the same, but once you cross that invisible border, my, the differences.”

  So many things to say, but I kept my mouth shut. Diane said, “Some time ago, a number of unelected judges over there in Boston decided people like me needed to be brought into the arena of fairness and equality, and to this day, they’re squabbling over it, down there in the Commonwealth. How dare a group of unelected judges upend law and custom without getting input from the people.”

  She turned again, her eyes still moist, a hint of a smile on her face. “Here, though, in this crazy, independent and somewhat loopy state, what happened? The legislators in Concord got together and thought the same thing that those judges did over there in Massachusetts. The legislators heard from people, the people got their input, and after a while, the same thing happened. In New Hampshire and in Massachusetts, peop
le like me can marry the ones they love. The only difference being, in New Hampshire, they did it right. Oh, some people are still making a fuss, and why not. That’s what a representative democracy is all about. Even so, what happened here … it was legitimate. It was from the people. I think it counts more.”

  Diane kept quiet. Out on the harbor a fishing boat started up, black diesel exhaust belching out. I said, “Kara and you aren’t on the same page, I take it.”

  A brief shake of her head. “Some days, Lewis, not even the same book. Or the same library. Oh, damn it, I’m getting old, my friend, and I want to settle down—make this permanent, come out of that damn stuffy closet and just get on with my life in public, proud of who I am, and who I love. Right now, I’m going in circles … and I’m scared that Kara either can’t or won’t keep up with me.”

  Her voice trembled with that last statement, and for whatever good it was, I put my arm around her shoulders and left it there. She took another deep breath and then laughed. “Some of the gossipers in town, if they saw us right now, they’d be damn confused, wouldn’t they.”

  “Serves them right.”

  “Sure does.”

  “What do the gossipers in town know?” I asked.

  “Oh, hell, it’s an open secret in Tyler who I am and who I live with—but damn it, I don’t want it to be a secret, closed or open. I just want … just want to be part of life, part of being normal.”

  I kept my arm around her for a while, and then, her voice low, she said, “Well, I guess being part of normal is being disappointed sometimes in the one you love.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  She gently disengaged my arm, took my hand, and surprising both of us, I think, kissed the tips of my fingers and placed my hand down on the dock. “You and your Annie Wynn. What do the two of you want?”

  “At this moment she wants to elect a certain senator from Georgia as the next president of the United States. After that … we’ll see where we go.”

  “What about you?”

  “Waiting it out, I suppose,” I said. “She’s in the proverbial driver’s seat.”

  Then she stood up, and I stood up next to her. The wind coming off the harbor picked up some, flipping her short brown hair around. “Some driver you’ve got there. Seriously, as one adult to another, Lewis … you look deep into her, you look hard, and if she’s the one, you fight to keep her. You got that? You fight to keep her … because neither of us is getting younger.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “All right, then.” She paused, looking into the distance as if trying to spot her Kara out there with the other protesters, and then said, “I’ll see what I can do, find out how the investigation is proceeding—but only under one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  She looked straight at me. “You and Paula … you’re friends, but there was something there, some time ago. Right?”

  “Right. It was a time ago. It’s over.”

  “Then you do this as friends. Nothing else. For if you spoil it with you and Annie over this … well, I won’t be happy—and you don’t want to see me unhappy.”

  I shuddered for her benefit, and mine. “You’re right. I don’t.”

  Then she gently pushed me on one shoulder. “Get going, then. You’ve got a deadline to meet.”

  “That I do.”

  I walked back to my Ford Explorer, leaving her alone at the end of the dock. I pulled out of the parking lot, honked the horn, got a quick wave in reply, and saw by the dashboard clock that I had missed my deadline by almost an hour.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In my upstairs office, I sat back in the chair, looking out at my narrow front yard. I had been home for nearly an hour, and in the drive from Diane’s condo to my own house, I had come up with the first few paragraphs of a story contrasting how Bronson Toles’s death was another in a series of violent deaths that seemed to strike men of peace, from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., and although I cringed at the thought of having those two men mentioned in a story about a restaurant and little music-hall owner, I had an idea that my editor down there in Boston might go for it. So I wrote and wrote, and spent only a few minutes in editing, rewriting, and spell-checking, and then I sent the little bugger off by e-mail to Boston and sat in my chair to await a screaming phone call from Denise Pichette-Volk.

  My chair creaked a bit. I suppose I could have oiled it up some, but I liked the little creaky sound. Made everything seem that much more real. From my office, I could make out the yard and the few clumps of scraggly grass, and then the rising hillock of rocks and boulders hiding my little slice of paradise from the passing motorists on Atlantic Avenue. This had been my sanctuary for a while, a long while, but now, like Diane Woods’s, this little sanctuary was being shaken up.

  I put my hands behind my head and looked at a little clock on my desk next to my Apple computer. I didn’t have many plans for the afternoon, save getting something to eat and then heading back down to Falconer to see the forces of clean energy and citizen democracy struggle against—

  The ringing phone thankfully derailed that string of nonsense, and when I picked up the phone, I was partially right. It was my new boss.

  “Lewis,” she said, “you were late getting this piece to me.”

  “I certainly was.”

  I heard her breathing. “I’ll give you a pass on that.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes, I will,” she said, “but I want you to do a little rewrite, get it back to me in an hour.”

  I took a pen from my cluttered desk and grabbed a notepad. “What do you need?”

  “The paragraph about the men of peace, comparing Toles to Gandhi and King.”

  I felt embarrassed that this weak part had been picked up so quickly. “Right.”

  She said. “I liked it. Liked it a lot. I just want you to enhance it a bit.”

  “Enhance? Enhance it how?”

  “Add another name,” she said. “JFK. Add him in as another man of peace cut down before his time. Gives a New England connection to it.”

  I moved again in my chair, heard that comforting squeak. “JFK. President Kennedy. Man of peace. The one who expanded our involvement in Laos and South Vietnam, ran for president on a platform of a nonexistent missile gap, whose brother set up a program to assassinate Castro, and who almost got us involved in a nuclear exchange. That JFK. That man of peace.”

  Denise said, “Spare me the history lesson. Just add it in and send it along, all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Added and sent. No problem.”

  “Good,” she said. “I just saw something come over the wires. The wife and stepson of Bronson Toles plan a special kind of demonstration tomorrow at five. Make sure you’re there.”

  She hung up abruptly, and so did I, and I spent a few minutes on the computer keyboard, despising every syllable, and then I sent the little bits of data along to another computer in Boston and sat back again, listening to the creak of my chair.

  * * *

  In a while I dialed a local number, and a male answered. “Hello?”

  “Mark? Mark Spencer?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  “Mark, this is Lewis Cole,” I said. “Just calling to check in on Paula.”

  The barest hesitation, and I was sure he was wondering about me, Paula’s former lover, checking in on her. “She’s doing okay,” he said.

  “Really?”

  Again that hesitation. A lawyer checking his opponent? “Really, Lewis. She’s doing fine.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Um, not really. She’s lying down. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Look, will you tell her I called?”

  “Certainly,” he said. “Sorry, I need to go now.”

  He hung up the phone, and so did I, thinking that Mark’s voice, as he talked about his girlfriend, Paula Quinn, had the same blankness of tone that I had heard in Diane’s t
alking about her Kara.

  * * *

  After sleeping in the next day and having a cup of tea for breakfast, I puttered around the house and caught up on paying some bills and reading a stack of newspapers. Soon it was time to eat and get back to work. I grabbed my pen, notebook, and jacket, went outside and got into my Ford Explorer, and made my way up the rocky driveway and off to Atlantic Avenue. A few minutes of northbound driving later, I pulled off at a small seafood restaurant called Sally’s Clam Shack. It’s on a tiny strip of land between Atlantic Avenue and the beach, in a weather-beaten building that looks like it had once washed ashore, and serves the best seafood in the area. Sally’s been dead for years, but her two sons—Neil and Patrick—keep it going.

  Inside I was greeted with the scents of fried food, which got my saliva glands into action. Most of the service is takeout, and during the height of the summer season, the line can curl outside for more than fifty feet. There are a handful of booths in the rear, and I saw that all were filled, save one. There were a couple of guys ahead of me, waiting, wearing blue jeans, hooded gray sweatshirts, and backward Red Sox baseball caps, and I was thinking maybe I’d do a takeout order when one of the co-owners, Neil Winwood, stepped out and nodded at me and said, “Right this way, Lewis.”

  I felt embarrassed, but my hunger pangs were outweighing any slight twinge of shame. I followed Neil, who was limping hard on each hip and knee, having come ashore to help his mom with the restaurant some years ago when his old joints and bones couldn’t take lobstering anymore. He had on black-and-white-checked pants, a white T-shirt, and an apron stained with water and flour. As I went to the booth, one of the two guys back there called out, “Hey, we were next!”

  Neil shrugged, handing me a menu. “He called ahead. Reservation.”

  The other guy pointed to a hand-printed sign underneath the cash register that read: NO RESERVATIONS ACCEPTED. “That sign says you don’t take no reservations.”