Dead Winter

by William G. Tapply

He nodded. “Exactly. If Connie was that way, she surely hid it well. I never suspected. But,” he said, shaking his head, “evidently I was naive in my own case.”

  “Your daughter. What did she tell you?”

  “Not much. Nothing, really. Kat seemed traumatized by the experience, to tell you the truth. She didn’t want to talk about it. She cried easily for over a year after she got back. Wouldn’t even talk to her brother. I assumed she was missing her mother. They were very close. That’s why Connie took Kat with her, I guess. Anyhow, I didn’t push her. It really doesn’t matter where they went. What matters is that Connie chose not to come back to me. And”—he spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness—“she still hasn’t.”

  “It must have occurred to you that something has happened to your wife.”

  He nodded slowly. “Sure. Of course. What can I do about that? I assume that if Connie got into trouble, got injured, or—or died or something—I would be notified.” He looked at me, imploring me to agree with him.

  I cooperated. “Of course. Makes sense.”

  “Since I haven’t heard anything, I assume…”

  “That she has chosen not to return.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. Anyway, that’s the background, Brady.”

  I tilted up my empty glass and looked in at the yellow dregs. “Maybe we should order some food.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course.” He lifted his head and looked around, which brought our waiter instantly.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. He was swarthy and somber and spoke with a Middle Eastern accent I couldn’t place.

  “I’ll have the scrod and Bibb lettuce salad,” said Winter.

  The waiter nodded his approval and looked at me. I shrugged. “Sounds good. Me too.”

  The waiter bobbed his head and slipped discreetly away.

  “This way I can say I got scrod today,” said Winter. He tried a smile to let me know he had made a joke. He seemed uncertain about how I would take it.

  I gave him a grin. “Let me see if I understand,” I said. “Your wife has been missing for six and a half years. Now you want to track her down.”

  He shook his head. “No, no. That’s not it. You misunderstand. It’s painfully clear to me she’s decided to make it permanent. If so, I must accept and respect her decision, as much as it hurts. If she should by some miracle decide to come back to me sometime in the future, I will welcome her with open arms, no questions asked. No, it’s nothing like that. Last month, Brady, I received a communication from the Boss.” He hesitated. “God, that is.”

  “I figured that’s who you meant.”

  “A myocardial infarction. Minor, they tell me. But I’m fifty-nine years old. A small lesson on mortality is not lost on me; Do you see?”

  “You want to put your affairs in order, so to speak.”

  “Yes. Should the Boss decide to give me the pink slip, Marc and Kat would be left with a terrible mess. Connie, of course, is the beneficiary of all my insurance. Virtually all my assets are in our joint names. I want the kids to have what’s coming to them when I die without a protracted legal hassle. And I want to get this squared away without a protracted hassle from my attorney. Protracting hassles is what Flynn and Barrows are best at. Florence Gresham said that this sort of thing was right up your alley.”

  “It is. It’s the sort of thing I do.”

  He held out his hands, palms up. “Well?”

  I frowned. “It’s kind of interesting, actually.” I looked up at him. “Easiest thing would be to get yourself a divorce.”

  He recoiled from this as if I had shaken a fist at him. “Never. Absolutely not.” He sighed. “I guess I’ve made a mistake. I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Coyne.”

  I smiled at him. “Ah, take it easy, Des.” I reached across the table and put my hand on his wrist. “I was testing you.”

  He blinked. “I don’t get it.”

  “You have insisted that you continue to love your wife. That you’d accept her back, no questions asked. I assume that if she should return upon hearing of your death, you’d want her well taken care of.”

  He nodded. “I thought I told you that.”

  “You did. And if you were telling me the truth, you would refuse a divorce.”

  “Which I did.” He frowned for an instant, then widened his eyes at me. “You doubted my veracity.” There was a note of incredulity in his voice, as if the idea was inconceivable.

  “Your sincerity, Des. I’m big on sincerity. It’s not something that is necessarily required between a lawyer and his client. But it is required between this particular lawyer and his clients. Of course,” I added, “it works both ways.”

  He gave me a smile, the first genuine one he had allowed himself. “Florence said you’d find a way to check me out.”

  “It’s a weakness of mine. I insist on knowing where I stand with those who want my services. In the short run, it costs me some business. In the long run, it makes the business I do have more pleasant for me. My own pleasure is important to me.”

  He rolled his eyes. “And I thought I was straitlaced.”

  “I prefer to think of it as principled.” I smiled and extended my hand to him. “If you still want me, I’d be happy to work with you,” I said.

  He grinned and grasped my hand. “I absolutely do.”

  2

  REARRANGING DESMOND WINTER’S ESTATE posed no problem. It was simply a matter of asking him the right questions, figuring out what he wanted, and translating it into words that others trained in the peculiar argot of the law would all understand the same way.

  To accomplish this, one simply has to find ways to say things that those not trained in the language of the law find impossible to understand. It’s what makes us lawyers necessary. We’re about the only ones who can figure out what any of the others are saying.

  It’s not hard. They teach us how in law school. Wherebys and whereases, a few parties-of-the-second-parts. Judicious use of semicolons. The odd Latin phrase.

  This was my work, my chosen profession.

  It usually bored the hell out of me. Since my peculiar niche in the legal scheme of things failed to interest me, I tried to compensate by selecting clients who did. Clients like Des Winter.

  Fortunately, my chosen profession didn’t interfere too much with my pursuit of brown trout and golf scores in the seventies. In fact, my profession subsidized those pursuits. It also paid Gloria’s alimony, the college tuition for Billy, my number one son, who tended to squander it, and it would take care of Joey’s in a couple years, too. Joey wouldn’t squander it.

  Des and I inevitably became friends. That’s what I was checking for that day at Locke Ober’s—the possibility that I would be able to like and respect the man who wanted to become my client. I have fired clients whom I lost respect for, or who liked to cut too close to the cutting edge of legality, or whom I just didn’t enjoy being with. Life is too damn short.

  In many respects, Des Winter was not a likely prospect to become my friend. For one thing, he turned out to be a prude, an indictment to which he freely confessed and about which he made no apology. While, for example, he acknowledged that the famed Massachusetts blue laws were a violation of any civilized concept of privacy, he agreed with every one of them as appropriate rules of conduct. Adultery, of course, was a sin. Period. Not far behind came cohabitation. Public displays of affection offended him.

  He liked to tell what he considered jokes. They typically bore on theological themes. They mostly took the form of riddles. They tended to embarrass the listener, especially since Des had a short repertoire and a poor memory of whom he had run through it with.

  For example: Q—Who was the fastest runner in the Bible? A—Adam. He was first in the human race.

  Or: Q—How do you make holy water? A—You boil the hell out of it.

  Knee-slappers. But it was hard not to love the man, dumb jokes and all.
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  I went to hear him preach a few times after I began to work with him and realized that I liked him very much. I found his theology more liberal, if anything, than my own, and strangely at odds with his personal ethic. He was, he told me, a Deist, a believer in a concept he said was popularized by Benjamin Franklin, and which postulated a universe like a clock—wound up by a God who then sat back bemusedly to wait for it to wind down. He took the Unitarian postulate—which denied the divinity of the Trinity—and pushed it to the edge of atheism. He advocated good works not, as the Calvinists would have had it, as a hedge against damnation, but as the moral obligation of a civilized human being. Theology had nothing to do with it. But it was the essence of religion.

  I found Des Winter’s homilies provocative and disturbing right up to his last one on Easter Sunday of 1982.

  “I doubt if Jesus of Nazareth appeared on that day,” he said. “I do not doubt that some people wanted him to do it so desperately that they were willing to imagine it. If he did, it would be a miracle. It’s dangerous to live for miracles. It makes us lazy and immoral.”

  Although Desmond Winter practiced what he preached as well as any man I ever knew, he never was able to suspend his belief that Connie would one day return to him, even though he freely admitted it would be a miracle.

  I am proud to say that I didn’t learn Des owned a thirty-eight-foot Bertram named Constance, which he moored at a marina in Newburyport and from which he loved to troll for striped bass and bluefish, until after I had agreed to take him on as a client. Constance was a gorgeous craft, with a flying bridge and outriggers and berths for six and twin Cummins diesels, and I fear I could easily have compromised the rigorous standards I held for admitting new clients to my roster had Des told me about her earlier.

  Des was an agreeable companion on a fishing boat. He loved and respected the sea and the fish we chased. He taught me how to recognize the distinctive odor of a school of rampaging blues, and he was as happy as I was to switch over to a fly rod when we got into them and to release all but the one or two we might want for the table.

  On those long lazy cruises in the mouth of the Merrimack and around Plum Island when the fish weren’t biting, I’d go forward to where Des was navigating with beers for both of us (for as otherwise rigidly upright as Des Winter was, he liked booze and handled it with gentility). He was more relaxed out on Constance, and while his repertoire of jokes didn’t change, he seemed to appreciate mine.

  But I often caught him staring unfocused out at the horizon, and I knew what he was looking for. Connie. It was as if he expected her one day to rise from the sea, much as Jesus was said to have risen from the dead.

  I’d nudge him and hand him a chilled can, and he’d shake himself and grin. “I was thinking about her,” he’d say. “Wondering where she is, what she’s doing. Hoping she’s happy.”

  And I’d squint into the distance. There was nothing to say.

  Sometimes he’d talk about his kids, and while he didn’t complain—it was not in his nature to complain—he often mused on how they might have turned out had their mother been there to help raise them. Des regarded himself as inept at parenting, and blamed himself—never the wayward Connie—for his offspring’s shortcomings.

  Kat, who he said had been a happy laughing child, overnight became a solemn, brooding young woman, given to long angry silences that seemed unprovoked and arbitrary to the people around her. She studied hard, almost defiantly, as if she had to prove herself worthy of the love of a mother who had abandoned her. She was a college student when I first met her. She regarded me suspiciously and resisted my mild efforts to crack her defenses. At first I found her disturbingly introverted, a young woman with a grudge against the world. It took a long time for us to become friends.

  When she graduated, she got a job with a small advertising firm in Newburyport. She found a condominium near the waterfront and moved out of Des’s big old house. Within three years she had her name on the company letterhead.

  Kat had a face that would have been considered beautiful had she chosen to smile more often—a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose, reddish blond hair cut short and efficient, a wide mouth, large green eyes. She was tall like Des and almost too thin.

  She wore tailored suits to work, and blue jeans and men’s shirts otherwise. I thought she looked much better in jeans.

  Her business partner divorced his wife to marry Kat. It lasted less than a year. Des asked me to handle her divorce. Kat Winter then sold out her share of the business to the heartbroken young man and set up her own competing agency, and I handled the mechanics of it.

  For a long time she refused to call me anything except Mr. Coyne. I called her Miz Winter.

  One March afternoon when I was in Newburyport to deliver some papers to her, I casually suggested supper at the Grog, a local restaurant featuring Cajun-style blackened fish that brought tears to my eyes. Kat, in her tweed suit, peered over her reading glasses at me and gifted me with one of her rare smiles. “Why, Mr. Coyne,” she said. “Are you asking me for a date?”

  “No way,” I replied promptly. “You are not a fun person. You are a client. And, may I add, a client whom I would not have taken on had I not been asked to by your father. I simply thought that we have a great deal to discuss if you really want to incorporate, and that I am getting hungry. Ergo, we can kill two birds with the same rock. If you eat supper with me, I can write off the whole thing, which will take the sting out of it.”

  She snatched her glasses from her face. Her green eyes glittered. She said, “Well, damn you…” And then she paused, cocked her head, and grinned. “Yes, damn you. Okay. Strictly business, of course. I mean, if you don’t want to fool around.”

  “I don’t fool around with my clients,” I said primly.

  “Oh, I’ll bet.”

  “They’re mostly too old.”

  Kat and I didn’t fool around at all. But we lingered at the Grog late that night. She drank stingers and I sipped Harvey’s Bristol Cream and we talked about Des, and somewhere along the way I began to call her Kat and she called me Brady.

  Her condo was a half mile from the restaurant. A cold breeze was coming off the waterfront and funneling down the street at us, so that we had to angle our bodies into it to keep our balance as we walked. After we had walked a block, Kat grabbed onto my arm. A block later she shifted her arm around my waist, and she leaned against me, burying her face against the side of my shoulder. It was natural that I would throw my arm around her.

  When we got to her door, she turned, standing one step higher than I. “Want to come in and thaw out? I can make coffee.”

  I shook my head. “Not a good idea.”

  She smiled. “You don’t have to think of me as a client, you know. You’re off the clock now.”

  “I am fully aware of all that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you are.”

  She tilted her head and brought her mouth against mine. It was a dry, tentative kiss, and I pulled away from it before it could evolve into something different. “Nothing wrong with being friends,” I said.

  She shrugged. “However you want it.”

  “Otherwise…”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  After that night we usually planned our business meetings so that we could eat together afterwards. I found her intelligent and knowledgeable. She never mentioned her mother, and I never asked about her. I had the feeling that she had dug a deep hole into her soul, buried all feelings about Connie there, and piled layers of self-control over it.

  Des’s son, Marc, was a year older than Kat, a dark, unpredictable, handsome young man. He was twenty-one when I first began to work with Des. When Connie Winter disappeared with Kat, Marc quit high school and fled to Augusta, Maine, where he pumped gas. Soon after Kat returned to Newburyport, Marc wandered back to the big house on High Street. After Kat left for college, Des and Marc continued to live there. They were both private, unyielding men, and
they got along awkwardly. They seemed to baffle each other. Marc tended bar at one of the local watering holes, repaired marine engines, and spent a lot of time aboard Constance. He kept the engines tuned and the brass polished and conducted much of his social life aboard her. He talked about getting his skipper’s license so he could take out charters, but he never seemed to get around to it.

  The summer he turned twenty-five Marc married the daughter of a history professor from Duke, who made the mistake of docking in Newburyport on a summer family jaunt. Marc took his new bride and several of their friends on an extended cruise up the coast by way of a honeymoon. On their return home when they tied up in Newburyport they were boarded by a contingent of state and local police, Coast Guard, and DEA agents, who held Marc and his crew at gunpoint while they searched Constance.

  They found a brick of cocaine the size of a one-pound box of Fanny Farmer chocolates wrapped in watertight plastic in the bilge. It was the first place the agents looked.

  Des called me, and I got Xerxes Garrett to handle Marc’s case. The others got their own lawyers and went to trial together. All of them, including his bride, claimed ignorance and pointed their collective finger at Marc. The prosecuting attorney produced a witness who was prepared to testify that Marc had approached him with an offer to set up a pipeline from Portsmouth to Fall River. Zerk plea-bargained away all but six months of relatively easy time at MCI Shirley for Marc.

  When Marc went inside, his wife returned to Virginia. Her father, the professor, got the nuptial bond annulled.

  After the trial and the appeal, Zerk told me, “I kinda like the dude. No bullshit about him. Told me he was set up. I told him we had no proof of that, we’d lose in court with all those witnesses fingering him. He understood right away. Told me to do what I could. Which is what I did. He thanked me afterward. Told me I was smart for a nigger. I told him he better learn how to talk to dusky-hued folks quick before he went inside, got his rectum reamed. He kinda grinned and called me sir. Good kid. Fucked up, though.”

  Des used to say, by way of apology for Marc, “What can you expect? He was the one Connie left behind.”