Nervous Water

by William G. Tapply

  When I got there, I found her leaning against the wall outside the main entrance smoking a cigarette. She was wearing snug-fitting blue jeans and a snug-fitting T-shirt and sandals. Her toenails were painted pink. No gun, no badge.

  I leaned against the wall beside her. “I remember the days when patients could smoke in their hospital rooms,” I said.

  She looked at me and smiled. “You must be way older than me.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I was just a little kid in those days.”

  She tapped her forefinger on her forehead. “What happened to you?”

  I decided not to tell her the whole complicated story. I figured Grannie Webster’s murder and Uncle Moze’s heart attack were connected. The link was Cassie. Horowitz knew about Uncle Moze, and I’d mentioned Charlene Staples to him, too. But it wasn’t my place to open up the Webster piece of the case to Charlene. If it needed to be done, Horowitz would do it.

  I touched my butterfly bandage. Under it was a lump the size of Mount Monadnock. At least that’s how it felt. “This?” I said. “Nothing. Tripped on the rug, hit my head on a chair. Clumsy.”

  She smiled. “You don’t strike me as the clumsy type.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the tub of sand. “Let’s go.”

  We took the elevator up to the ICU. When we stepped out, she said, “I’ll be in the waiting room.”

  “Lest you inadvertently eavesdrop on a privileged conversation,” I said.

  She smiled. “Exactly.”

  “I’ll come get you if he’s willing to talk to you.”

  She nodded and headed down the corridor.

  As I turned the corner to the hallway leading to the ICU, a man coming around the corner bumped into me.

  “Hey,” he said. “Watch where you’re going.”

  “You, too,” I said.

  Then I saw who it was. Uncle Jake. His face was red, and his eyes were slitted and angry. His hands were balled into hard fists.

  He pulled back and glared at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Visiting my uncle.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”

  “How is he?”

  “Alive, unfortunately.” And with that, he shouldered his way past me, went over to the elevator, and began jabbing at the button.

  “Nice talking to you,” I called to him.

  He looked at me, shook his head, and turned back to watch the light over the elevator. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, as if he were disappointed that he hadn’t had the chance to hit somebody.

  I rang the bell to the ICU, and after a minute, a nurse opened the door. I didn’t recognize her.

  “I’m Moses Crandall’s nephew,” I said. “My name is Brady Coyne. I’m here to visit him.”

  She frowned for a moment, then said, “Oh, yes. We’ve talked on the phone.” She hesitated. “He just had a visitor. You might find him a bit, um, agitated.”

  “His brother?” I said. “Jacob?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. They were talking. Then Mr. Crandall—Jacob, that is, the brother—he started yelling, and then he come storming out of there. I went in to check on my patient. I was afraid, a man with a heart condition…”

  “Is he all right?”

  She nodded. “He was spittin’ mad about something. Didn’t say what. I asked if I could get him something, and he said a glass of whiskey would be nice. So I guess he’s okay. Why don’t you come on in and see for yourself.” She held the door open for me.

  I went over to Uncle Moze’s cubicle and pulled up a chair beside his bed. He was lying on his side, facing away from me. “Hey? Uncle Moze? You awake?”

  He turned and looked at me. “Hey, sonnyboy.” His voice was a gravelly whisper. “What in hell are you doing here?”

  “I needed to see for myself that they were taking good care of you.”

  He lifted a hand and let it fall. “No complaints.”

  “The food’s okay?”

  “Food is food.”

  “Jake was here, huh?”

  “Don’t know why he bothered,” he said. “Come to harass me, is all.”

  “Harass you about what?”

  He shook his head. “Nothin’. It don’t matter. Jake’s a hostile sonofabitch, that’s all. Always got some chip or other on his shoulder. I told him, I said, don’t bother coming back here. Told him I didn’t want to see him no more, brother or no brother. The hell with him.”

  “Is that why he got mad?”

  “I s’pose so.”

  I hitched my chair closer. “Uncle Moze,” I said, “I want to know who did this to you.”

  “Who did what?”

  “Hit you.”

  “Somebody hit me?”

  “Somebody punched you in the chest. It caused you to have a heart attack. That’s why you’re here.”

  He frowned. “I got punched, huh?”

  I nodded. “Tell me what you remember.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember nothing.”

  “It was early in the morning,” I said. “You were home in your bedroom sleeping. You heard something. You got up and went into the living room. Somebody was there. They punched you in the chest and you had a heart attack.”

  He shrugged. “If you say so. I got no memory of it.”

  “Something woke you up, caused you to go out into the living room. Remember?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Maybe you didn’t see them,” I said. “Maybe it was just a shadow. Maybe they said something.”

  “I don’t remember nothing about it, sonnyboy. You can keep askin’ me in as many different ways as you want, but I ain’t going to suddenly remember. It’s just a blank. Nothin’.”

  “Well,” I said, “if it comes back to you, tell me, okay?”

  “It don’t make no difference anyways,” he said. “I know what’s going on. I’m a goner, that’s what. I’m on my last legs.”

  “Oh, you’re a tough old buzzard,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of mileage left on you.” I bent closer to him. “Uncle Moze, listen to me. This is important. Don’t hold back on me, okay? Was it Cassie? Is she the one who hit you?”

  “Why in hell would you think that?” he said.

  “I don’t think it. I just wondered.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me for a moment. “Leave Cassie out of it,” he said. “I’m tired. Go away.” He rolled away from me.

  After a minute, his breathing became slow and regular. If he wasn’t sleeping, he was pretending to sleep. Either way, he was done with me.

  I stood up, gave his shoulder a squeeze, and walked out of the ICU.

  Charlene Staples was standing in the little waiting room with her back to the door, looking out the window.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She turned around and arched her eyebrows.

  I shook my head.

  She shrugged. “You think he really doesn’t remember what happened to him?”

  “I don’t think it matters whether he remembers or not,” I said. “If he does, he’s made up his mind not to tell us. If you want to catch the bad guy, it looks like you’re going to have to do it without Moze’s help.”

  “Oh, never fear,” she said, “I’ll catch her.”

  Twenty

  I got home a little after five that afternoon. As soon as I opened the front door, I was assailed by the aroma of fresh-baked bread. I followed my nose into the kitchen. Two loaves were cooling on wire racks on the counter. So was a blueberry pie.

  I peeked out the window. Evie was slouched in one of our Adirondack chairs. She was wearing shorts and T-shirt. Bare feet. Her perfect legs were splayed out and her head was tilted back to the sun and her eyes were closed. Henry was lying beside her, directly beneath Evie’s hand, which dangled over the side of the chair.

  I made a couple of gin and tonics and took them outside. I kissed Evie’s cheek. It was warm from the sun, and soft, and
smelled faintly of damp loam and crushed herbs.

  Her eyes fluttered open and looked at me unfocused for a moment. Then she smiled. “Hi, sweetie.”

  “Smells great in there. You’ve been busy.”

  “Made the bread from scratch,” she said. “Excellent therapy.”

  “Excellent eating, too.” I sat beside her. “You feeling like you need therapy?”

  She shrugged. “How’s your uncle?”

  I told her, and that was it for the subject of therapy.

  At around seven thirty on Monday morning I was sitting out in the back garden working on my second mug of coffee when Evie came out. She was wearing a pale blue business suit—narrow knee-length skirt, matching jacket, silk blouse. Her hair was up in a bun and her sneakers were on her feet.

  She bent down to kiss me. I reached up, hooked my arm around her neck, and brought her down so I could kiss her properly.

  “Careful of the hair,” she said.

  “You’re leaving early again. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Work, work, work. Another damn meeting.”

  About twenty minutes after Evie left there was a knock on the wooden door in the brick wall that opened from our garden to the back alley.

  “It’s unlocked,” I called.

  The door opened and Roger Horowitz came in.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  He came over and sat at the picnic table. “Got some coffee?”

  I went into the kitchen, poured a mug of coffee, brought it out, and set it beside Horowitz’s elbow. A manila file folder lay in front of him.

  I sat across from him. “What’s up?”

  “Grantham Webster,” he said. “The dead guy. How’s your dog?”

  “He’s okay. A little lame. You gonna ask about my head?”

  He shrugged. “Looks fine to me.”

  “So what about Webster?”

  “Wednesday?” he said. “The first time you met with him in his office? I want you to go over everything that happened.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I already—”

  “Humor me, Coyne.”

  So I recounted what I could remember about my visit with Grannie Webster. Horowitz was particularly interested in the phone call he’d received while I was there, and he queried me closely about Webster’s reaction to it, but I couldn’t remember anything more or different from what I’d told him already.

  “He said it was his ex-wife?”

  “Yes. Asked me to step out of the office, give him some privacy, which I did, though I could hear his voice through the door. When I went back in he said it was his ex-wife. From what I overheard, he seemed angry, annoyed, upset.”

  Horowitz nodded. “That’s funny.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Webster was never married. Didn’t have any ex-wife.”

  I shrugged. “So he lied to me. So what? It was none of my business.”

  “If it wasn’t some ex-wife,” said Horowitz, “who was it?”

  I nodded. “That’s obviously the question. The answer is, I have no idea who it was.”

  “That call came on his cell phone, you said?”

  I nodded.

  “Now that phone’s gone. Along with the CDs from his computer.”

  I smiled at Horowitz. “He was killed the next day. Thursday. I’ve got a suspicion that you didn’t take the weekend off, go down to the Cape, lie around the beach.”

  He smiled sourly. “Not fucking hardly.”

  “You gonna share with me?”

  “Why the hell should I?”

  “Because,” I said, “you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something from me. Quid pro quo, Roger. What’ve you found out?”

  He gave me a sour grin. “Not enough. Webster was shot twice in the chest with a thirty-eight from about three feet away.”

  “Thirty-eight?” I said. “That’s—”

  “Right.” He nodded. “The gun your friend Hurley reported missing was a thirty-eight. Millions of thirty-eights around. But, yeah, we’re checking that angle.”

  I spread out my hands. “Seems pretty compelling to me.”

  “Compelling and evidence ain’t the same thing,” he said. “Near as we can figure, the shooter was probably standing on the other side of Webster’s desk. Even if you’re a crack shot, you can’t hit a damn thing with one of those thirty-eight handguns from much farther. Forensics got some fibers and smudged prints and other shit that’ll probably turn out to be useless.”

  “A lot of probablies there,” I said.

  He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. “More like maybes than probablies, actually. We’d really like to talk to your cousin.

  “You think Cassie stole Hurley’s gun and—?”

  “I don’t think nothing,” he said. “I just want to talk to her.”

  “Well,” I said, “you’d have to stand in line, except nobody seems to know where she is. She’s missing. She may not be alive.”

  “Maybe Webster knew.”

  I looked at him. “I see where you’re going with this.”

  He shook his head. “Glad you do. I don’t. Nothing fits. I’m thinking she’s the key, that’s all. What happened to your uncle, what happened to Webster. Cassandra Crandall is the common thread.”

  “Her husband, the dentist, he’s a common thread, too.”

  “Of course he is,” Horowitz said. “Hurley says he was filling teeth all day.”

  “You can verify that?”

  He shrugged. “We’re working on it. We got a good idea of when Webster was shot. If the dentist took a long lunch hour that day, or left the office early…”

  “I can’t stop thinking he killed Cassie,” I said. “She’s missing two weeks and he doesn’t report it?”

  “Yeah,” said Horowitz, “it’s always the spouse. Except we got no body, no witness, no nothing. Far as we know, we got no crime there. No case to investigate. That’s why we’re talking about Grantham Webster. Him, we definitely got a crime.”

  I shrugged. “I wish I could help you.”

  “Me, too,” he said. He opened the manila folder, flipped through a stack of papers, removed two of them, and put them on the table. “Forensics took that computer he had in his office, plus a laptop from his apartment. So far, they haven’t found anything interesting. We got the phone records from his house and his office phones. It’s gonna take a while to track down the records from his cell phone.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “What?” I arched my eyebrows right back at him.

  “What did you do yesterday on a pretty Sunday in July?”

  “I visited my uncle in the hospital,” I said. “Had a few gin and tonics. Ate Evie’s fresh-baked bread. Why?”

  “Me and Marcia,” said Horowitz, “we spent the day riding herd on forensics and ballistics, checking out witnesses, running down phone numbers.”

  “You should’ve been a lawyer,” I said, “take Sundays off.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Like you.”

  “Any luck with witnesses?”

  He shook his head. “The college is between summer sessions. No students or teachers around. Most of the administration offices were empty, too. We found a groundskeeper who was mowing the lawn that afternoon. He says he didn’t see or hear anything. Those mowers are so loud, he wouldn’t hear a bomb exploding, never mind a gunshot from somewhere inside a building. So far, that’s it.”

  “What about the phone records?”

  He pushed the two sheets of paper at me. “Incoming calls,” he said. “Webster’s office and home phone, the past month.”

  Each sheet had two columns of dates and phone numbers. Five of them on the sheet from Webster’s home phone and six on the office-phone sheet had circles around them. They were all the same number with a 207 area code. Eleven calls, and all of them had been made during the two weeks leading up to the day that Webster was killed.

  “What do you see, Coyne?”

  “I see that you’ve drawn circles around on
e of these numbers that keeps coming up. It’s a 207 area code, which is Maine. This number appears to interest you.” I looked up at him. “You haven’t seen Webster’s cell-phone records?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. Cell-phone records are harder to get at.” He pointed at the papers in front of me. “See anything else?”

  I studied them. “I see that all these 207 calls you’ve circled were all made after Cassie went missing. I see that all of the calls to Webster’s office phone were made on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays between two and four in the afternoon, which was when he held office hours. Whoever made these calls knew his schedule.” I looked up at him. “Whose number is this?”

  He shrugged. “These calls were made from a convenience store in West Canterbury called Roy’s It’s not a pay phone. It’s a private phone that’s out on the porch for people to use. The store sells phone cards to the locals. A lot of them are too poor to have their own phone.”

  “I’ve been everywhere in Maine,” I said. “Never heard of West Canterbury.”

  “Nobody’s heard of it,” said Horowitz. “Population about two hundred, not counting the goats and chickens. Mostly swamp and woods and run-down farms and dirt roads. That convenience store is about it for commerce in West Canterbury.”

  “You called and talked to them?”

  He rolled his eyes. “That’s pretty much what we mean by running down phone numbers. It’s how Benetti and I spent the damn weekend.”

  I jabbed my finger at the sheets of paper. “So who’s making these calls?”

  He grinned quickly. “That’s the question, huh?”

  “Where in Maine did you say West Canterbury was?” I said.

  “Didn’t say,” he said. “Turns out it’s just two towns to the north and west of Moulton.”

  I looked at him. “No shit.”

  He nodded. “No shit.”

  “You can’t go up there,” I said.

  “I can go up there,” he said. “But I can’t do business.”

  “Jurisdiction.”

  He nodded.

  “You being from Massachusetts, this place being across the border in Maine.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what we’re usually getting at when we talk about jurisdiction.”