Dead Winter

by William G. Tapply

  Danvers police indicate that Greenberg died of multiple stab wounds. They are seeking for questioning a woman who allegedly visited the victim in the evening.

  Julie had observed that there were a lot of Green-bergs in the phone book, several of them named Nathan. She called them all. None admitted to calling my answering machine on Sunday.

  Here was another Nathan Greenberg. This one was from North Carolina. He wouldn’t have been in any of the phone books Julie used. He had been a lawyer. He could have called me on Sunday and left a message on my machine. He probably couldn’t have called me on Monday. He was dead on Monday.

  In a motel in Danvers.

  Which lies very close to Newburyport.

  I reread the story. Something bothered me about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I pondered it as I ate a cold wedge of leftover pepperoni and sausage pizza and drank a big glass of orange juice for breakfast.

  I tried to figure it out as I drove from my apartment to my office in Copley Square.

  When I sat at my desk, I read the story again.

  The motel owner referred to Greenberg as a “little bald guy.” I reread the phrase. Bald guy. Bald man. Ballman.

  Eyesore maybe swisher ballman.

  What could a person who talked as if he had a mouthful of congealed oatmeal be trying to say that would come out sounding like that?

  Something about a bald man, I was willing to bet. And I was further willing to bet the bald man in question, the ballman Snooker Lynch tried to tell me about over the telephone, was none other than the dead Nathan Greenberg who, I also believed, was the identical Nathan Greenberg who had tried to contact me.

  I wrote Snooker Lynch’s verbal burps and grunts, as I had spelled them phonetically, onto a yellow legal pad and stared at them. If ballman truly was “bald man,” and Snooker’s ballman was Nathan Greenberg, then I was prepared to believe that Greenberg’s death was connected to Maggie’s.

  I went out to Julie’s desk. She was busy at the computer. “Excuse me,” I said.

  Without turning she said, “Hang on a sec.”

  She tapped at the keys for another minute or two, then swiveled her head to look up at me. “Yes, my lord?”

  “Remember that phone message from Greenberg?”

  She nodded.

  “You said he didn’t sound Jewish, remember?”

  “Well, he didn’t.”

  I touched her shoulder. “Don’t get huffy. What did he sound like to you?”

  She frowned. “He spoke soft. Southern accent, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  She shrugged. “He sounded southern, yes.”

  They sound southern in North Carolina.

  I showed her what I had written down from Snooker Lynch’s phone conversation. Eyesore maybe swisher ballman. She frowned at the words. “What’s this, some e. e. cummings poetry or something?”

  “It’s something a guy who doesn’t talk very well said to me. I think the word ‘ballman’ means bald man. Greenberg was bald.”

  She shrugged. “So?”

  “So I want to try to figure out what the rest of it means. Help me.”

  We took turns saying the syllables aloud, slurring them, stammering and spitting and substituting similar sounds, trying to reconstruct what Snooker’s poor brain had wanted his mouth to say. After a while we gave up on “eyesore” and went to work on “maybe.”

  “May,” said Julie. “Mayney. Mamie. Maisie. Shit.”

  “It’s not shit. Do it alphabetically.”

  “Maybe. Maycey. Maydie. Mayfee. Maygee. May—”

  “Hold it,” I said. “Say that again.”

  “Mayfee? Maygee?”

  “That’s it!” I kissed her on the cheek, a very wet enthusiastic one. “Maggie. It’s Maggie. He was saying something about Maggie and the bald man.”

  Julie frowned doubtfully. “What about the rest of these words?”

  “I’m not sure it’s important,” I said. “Gotta go make a phone call.”

  I went back into my office and called Horowitz at state police headquarters.

  “Now what?” he said when the switchboard put me through.

  “What can you tell me about this guy Greenberg who got killed up in Danvers?”

  He coughed. “Why?”

  “You smoking?”

  “Yeah. No substitute for gum, though. So why do you want to know about the Danvers thing?”

  “He was a lawyer. I have a thing about lawyers getting bumped off.”

  “You want to get smartass, don’t ask me to divulge police business to you.”

  I lit a Winston. “I’m sorry. It’s a dumb hunch. I had a call from someone named Nathan Greenberg on Sunday. Then Des Winter’s daughter-in-law gets murdered. Then this guy named Nathan Greenberg turns up murdered in Danvers. Danvers is pretty close to Newburyport.”

  “Dumb hunch is right.”

  “Pretty please?” I said.

  “Jesus,” he mumbled. “You won’t leave me alone, will you?”

  “Never.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Hang on.”

  I finished the cigarette. It took him about five minutes, during which time I drew scrolls and arrows on the pad of paper on which I had translated Snooker Lynch’s message.

  “Doesn’t look like this one is related to the Newburyport thing,” he said when he came back on the line. “This guy Greenberg was stabbed six times in the throat and chest. The M.E. figures a serrated kitchen knife, though the weapon hasn’t been recovered yet. The guy was robbed. No watch. Found his wallet in a trash barrel by the motel parking lot. No cash, no credit cards. They put his time of death between nine Sunday night and three Monday morning. Guy at the motel says he thought he saw a woman go into Greenberg’s unit sometime in the evening. Couldn’t make any kind of identification, of course, either of her or of the car she was driving. I surmise that broads go in and out of that place all the time.”

  “Hookers,” I said.

  “Yeah. My guess is one of them offed Greenberg.”

  “Any idea what Greenberg was doing in Danvers? In the paper it said he was from North Carolina.”

  I heard papers rustle. “Nothing on that here. I imagine someone’ll look into that, though it doesn’t appear relevant.”

  “It might be if his death and Maggie’s are connected.”

  “I’ll pass along your hunches,” said Horowitz. I didn’t believe him.

  “Is that it?”

  “Well, he was driving a Hertz rental. Last year’s Chevy Citation. Blue. Got it at the airport Saturday. Ah, he works for a firm in Asheville. Slavin, Jones is the name of it. They haven’t done an autopsy yet. When they do, I’ll let you know whether he ate Chinese or Italian before he got killed.” He paused. “And that is all. And I really ain’t supposed to tell you, so don’t go blabbing about it.”

  “If you didn’t know you could trust me, you wouldn’t have told me.”

  “I just like it better when you owe me than when I owe you.”

  I thanked Horowitz and hung up.

  I swiveled around and stared out my office window at the sky. It was uniformly pale gray, the color of spit, and it hung low so that the tops of the taller buildings looked fuzzy.

  The estimated time of Greenberg’s death overlapped with Maggie’s. It was at least theoretically possible for him to have murdered her and returned to his motel in Danvers, whereupon someone could have murdered him.

  Or Maggie could have killed him, sped back to Des’s boat, and gotten her head smashed in.

  The same person could have killed them both.

  Or the two deaths were totally unrelated.

  Horowitz clearly leaned toward the latter conclusion. I had to agree that it was the most compelling, especially in the absence of Snooker Lynch’s phone call, which, for no particularly good reason, I had decided not to share with Horowitz. All he would have needed to hear from me was that my suspicions had been fired by a series of nonsense sounds from
a retarded man over the telephone late at night.

  On the other hand, if Snooker had seen Maggie with Greenberg…

  I reached the answering machine at Des’s house. I hung up halfway through his recorded invitation for me to leave a message.

  A no-nonsense female answered the phone at Kat Winter’s office. “Winter, Inc.,” she said. “May I help you?”

  “I’d like to talk to Kat.”

  “Miz Winter is in conference just now. May I have her return your call?”

  “When did Kat get a secretary?”

  “I’m not a secretary, sir. I am an administrative assistant.”

  “My secretary would rather be called a secretary. I tried to make her an administrative assistant once. She got pissed. Said she was a secretary and proud of it. She runs the damn office.”

  “Do you want to leave a message, or what?”

  “Julie—she’s my secretary—says if you’re really liberated, you don’t get hung up on what you’re called. You gotta take pride in your work and make sure you get paid what you’re worth for it.”

  “We’re very busy. If you want Kat to call you back, you better leave your name and number. She doesn’t pay me to listen to a bunch of bullshit when I answer the phone. She tells me just to hang up if some asshole tries to give me a hard time.”

  I took a deep breath. “Hey. I’m sorry. I’ve got things on my mind. My name is Coyne and I’m Kat’s lawyer and I do need to speak to her and I apologize for coming on strong. Okay?”

  “Hold on a minute, Mr. Coyne. I’ll get her for you.”

  I whistled a few bars from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony while I waited for Kat to come on the line. When she did, she sounded out of breath.

  “Brady, what’s up?”

  “You been jogging?”

  “Actually, I was in the bathroom.”

  “Your secretary—I’m sorry, administrative assistant—used the same euphemism Julie uses. Conference. She said you were in conference.”

  “You probably bring the sports page with you.”

  “Enough scatology for one day. Simple question. I tried to call your father or Marc, but they’re out.”

  “Arranging things for Maggie, I think.”

  “My question is this. Do you know how I can get ahold of Snooker Lynch?”

  “Snooker? Why in the world would you want to do that?”

  “He tried to call me.”

  “Snooker?”

  “I think so.”

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t’ve said he knew how to use a telephone. How do you know Snooker?”

  “I met him yesterday outside Des’s house. He was on his bike, leaning against my car.”

  “He lives with his aunt down near the river. Far as I know it’s just the two of them.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Sure. Dotty McCarthy. She used to work in the town hall. Retired a few years ago.”

  “You wouldn’t mind looking up her phone number, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind, but I happen to know it’s unlisted. She got too many crank calls. People making fun of Snooker. It’s so easy to set him off, they could just say something to him on the phone and they’d start to hear things breaking and poor Snooker snarffling and gurgling, trying to swear and having no luck at it. So Dotty got her number changed, took it out of the book. Snooker’s kind of an institution around town. Like everybody’s pet. But there’s always a few Neanderthals who love nothing better than to pick on someone like Snooker.”

  I sighed. “So can you tell me how to find Dotty McCarthy’s house then?”

  She chuckled. “Sure, I can tell you. You going to pay a visit?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  I jotted down the directions Kat gave me. I was familiar enough with the area. It wasn’t far from the marina where Des moored Constance.

  “Got it,” I said when she was done.

  “Supper with me after your visit, then. I accept no excuse.”

  “The Grog at six thirty.”

  “You got it.”

  “Give my best to your, um, administrative assistant.”

  “I’d rather save your best for myself.”

  I spent the morning signing all the stuff Julie gave me to sign, talking to the people she got on the phone for me, and conferring with the one client with whom I had an appointment, a periodontist named Barton who sported thick gold necklaces and copper bracelets and a three handicap. Rick Barton had earned lots of money cutting and stitching rich people’s gums, none of which he was inclined to share with the government, and he had ignored my advice by retaining a tax accountant who promised more than he could deliver.

  I told Rick I doubted we could avoid steep penalties, but that I might be able to keep him out of prison. This seemed to make him happy. He invited me to play the member-guest with him at his country club in Concord. I snapped my fingers in disappointment, citing a fictional court commitment.

  I went out at one and brought back Italian subs from across the street. Julie and I spread waxed paper over her desk and ate together, licking oil and bits of onion and hot pepper off our fingers, sipping Pepsi, and talking baseball. She felt that seven and a half games was not too far from first place in the middle of July, and that the Red Sox were poised for a big run at the old gonfalon.

  Julie actually talked that way. The old gonfalon.

  “They’ve got some good sticks riding the pine,” she said.

  Also, she pointed out that the shortstop had been throwing a lot of leather recently.

  I told Julie I was looking forward to the football season. “The Pats’re going to abandon the I formation. Mix it up. Go to the shotgun, even on first down. They’ve strengthened themselves at cornerback, and the linemen are learning their stunts. Question is Miami. They still can’t even beat the spread down there, even though they don’t play in the Orange Bowl anymore.”

  Julie picked up a chunk of provolone and dropped it into her upturned mouth. She looked like a baby bird at feeding time. “You football nuts talk funny,” she grumbled.

  It was about three o’clock when I pulled into Dotty McCarthy’s side yard. She lived in a shoebox-shaped little house. The mustard-colored paint was cracking and peeling. A rusty rotary lawnmower sat in the middle of the front yard, where it had either died or run out of gas halfway through its job. Half of the grass stood about six inches high. The unmowed half was about a foot of shaggy grass and weed. A few white wildflowers bloomed in the uncut part.

  I mounted the crumbling cement stoop and tried the bell. I detected no ding from inside. I depressed it again, waited, and then knocked. After a moment I thought I heard movement inside. I knocked again.

  The door opened suddenly and completely. “Now you just leave the boy alone!” snapped the woman from behind the screen door. She was shaped like a light bulb, with a small head, narrow shoulders and chest, and massive hips that seemed to span the doorway. Her hands were resting on those great pillow hips. A half-smoked cigarette protruded from the precise middle of her mouth. An inch of ash clung precariously to its tip.

  “Mrs. McCarthy?” I said, using my Yale Law School smile.

  She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not who I thought you’d be,” she said. It did not come out as an apology.

  Without touching her cigarette with her fingers, she sucked on it. The ash fell onto her chest. She brushed it away.

  “I’d like to talk to your nephew.”

  “Why?”

  “He called me last night. I wanted to be sure I understood what he said.”

  “So who’re you?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said. I took out my wallet, extracted one of my business cards, and held it up in front of the screen door for her to see.

  She turned her face away. “Ain’t got my glasses on. That could say you were the President himself, wouldn’t impress me. What’d you say your name was?”

  “Coyn
e. Brady Coyne.”

  She frowned. “Yup. That’s what he was sayin’. Sounded more like ‘bone.’ He was sayin’ he gotta call Mr. Bone.”

  “That was me. Coyne. He was trying to tell me something. I think it might’ve been important, but I couldn’t understand all of it.”

  “Nobody understands what Ernest says. Except me, of course. But then, I’ve known him a long time. Twenty years, nearly, he’s been with me.” She cocked her head. “Most folks don’t even bother tryin’. They figure his brain’s no good and he ain’t got anything worth listenin’ to. You figure different, huh?”

  “Yes. He was trying to tell me something.”

  She cocked her head and looked at me differently, as if she had suddenly noticed something for the first time. Then, evidently satisfied that she had seen it accurately, she nodded. “His brain ain’t quite right, of course. But it works. For some things, it works good. If he could talk right, folks wouldn’t tease him so. He ain’t as dumb as he seems, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, I know he can use a telephone.”

  “He can use lots of things.”

  “They have special schools, new therapeutic techniques, you know. The Commonwealth is very enlightened about diseases like his.”

  She shrugged. “I reckon it’s too late now. Maybe when he was a boy…”

  “They have good programs for adults.”

  She shrugged, and I guessed Dotty McCarthy liked things exactly the way they were.

  “Is Snooker—Ernest—at home?”

  “Nope. Hardly ever is, ’cept at mealtime. I feed the boy good. Three times regular. Eats like an elephant, I don’t mind telling you. Takes all my pension just to feed him. Otherwise he’s off on that bicycle of his, lookin’ for people to pay attention to him. Fact that some of them tease and taunt him don’t seem to matter. He don’t know the difference. Mostly, people are nice enough. The boy just likes company. You look down on the docks. He likes to hang around the boats, talk to the people there. Might find him dangling a handline off the end, tide’s right. Sometimes he’ll bring home some flounder or mackerel, proud as a kitten with a dead mouse. I cook ’em up for us. About what the poor boy’s good for. Bringing home dead fish. Blessed shame.”