Dead Winter

by William G. Tapply

  The store sold yard goods, live bait, plumbing supplies, and pornographic magazines as well as food. I picked up a wedge of aged Vermont cheddar, a bunch of green grapes, a yard-long loaf of French bread, and a cold six-pack of Coors.

  When I put the bag into the back seat of the car, Kat arched her eyebrows but said nothing. Outside the village I turned left, heading south on a narrow two-lane road that followed a tumbling freestone stream. A couple miles later I found what I was looking for—a class-two road that angled right, over the stream.

  I parked in a turnoff beside the stream. I got out, tossed my sport coat onto the back seat, and picked up the bag of goodies. “Grab that blanket,” I said to Kat.

  She reached behind her for the brown army blanket I had kept on the back seat of whatever car I was driving since high school days. Without saying anything, she followed me along the edge of the stream until we found what I was looking for—a high bank topped by a grove of pines that overlooked a deep pool in the stream. I put the bag of groceries on the ground and Kat and I shook out the blanket over the cushiony bed of pine needles.

  She sat on one corner, hugging her knees, her cheek resting on her forearms. I cracked two Coors and handed one to her. She took it without comment, held it against her cheek for a moment, then took a sip.

  “Come on, Kat. Snap out of it.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  I shrugged. I took my fishing knife from my pocket, wiped the blade on my pants, and hacked off a chunk of cheese. Then I broke off some bread. I handed bread and cheese to Kat. Then I took some for myself.

  “The guy in the store cut this wedge off a big wheel,” I said. “Said it was well aged. Nice and sharp, huh?”

  She nodded. “It’s good.”

  I abandoned my conversational efforts. I ate and drank and tuned into the familiar outdoor cacophony: the buzz of locusts from a nearby meadow, the shush of breezes in the pines overhead, the distant staccato caw of a worried crow, the tinkle of the stream bouncing over rocks, and the complex mingle of woods noises, and after a while I more or less forgot Kat was with me.

  When I finished eating I stood up, brushed the crumbs off the front of my shirt, and walked the few feet to the steep edge where a rocky ledge sloped directly down to the stream. A little pine-needled shelf jutted out over a deep, green pool where the currents funneled against the ledge. I lay down on my belly, propped my chin in my hands, and peered down into the water.

  The pool was dappled in filtered sunlight. I could see straight down through the martini-clear water. I could count the rocks and pebbles on the bottom. It took me a few minutes to find what I was looking for.

  Allowing for refraction, I guessed he was fourteen or fifteen inches long. He lay still as a waterlogged stick behind a small boulder near the head of the pool, a gray ghosty shape. His body and tail waved rhythmically with the currents. As I watched, he seemed to float upward toward the surface. He drifted backward a few feet, his nose nearly touching the buff-colored mayfly that floated above. Then with a suddenness that belied his otherwise effortless motions, he raised his snout out of water and gave a quick powerful twist of his tail that left a tiny whirlpool where he had been. The mayfly had disappeared. My trout sank back into the water and casually finned to his post behind the boulder.

  A moment later the trout repeated the performance, and again, and I learned his feeding rhythm, and I knew that if I waded across the river downstream of this pool, where shallow water bubbled over a rocky riffle, and crept up the far bank, crouched low to present no silhouette, and took up a position fifteen feet down and to the side of that trout, and if I cast carefully four or five feet upstream of his lie, with a little right-hand curve in the leader, and if I had managed to tie on the right fly, and if the leader tippet wasn’t too coarse, and if I mended my line properly so that the artificial would float naturally down to him at the instant when he was ready to eat again—if I did all that, perhaps this fish would drift under my fly and lift up his snout and flick his tail and suck it in. And if I were alert, I would raise my rodtip firmly and I would drive the tiny hook into his jaw, and if I gentled him just right I might lead him to my net. Then I would cradle him in my hand and twist the hook from his jaw and lower him into the river. I’d hold him there with his nose pointed into the current until I was sure that his gills were pulsing. Then I’d take my hand away and he’d pause for a moment, suspended at my feet, until he realized he was free. He’d flick his tail and dart back to his position behind his boulder.

  Soon he’d forget what had happened to him. Fifteen minutes later he’d begin feeding again. But then if I cast my fly to him, something primeval would flash in the tiny bit of matter that passed as his brain, and he would not follow it. Maybe tomorrow, but not again today.

  “What is it?”

  I jerked my head around. “Jesus, Kat. Please don’t ever sneak up on me like that again.”

  She settled onto the ground beside me, her hip and thigh touching mine. I could feel the warmth of her along my leg. She leaned her head against my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You just startled me, that’s all.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’ve been a terrible grouch.”

  “I guess you’re entitled.”

  “No reason to take it out on you.”

  “That’s what lawyers are for.”

  “Oh, Christ… What’re you looking at?”

  “Down there. There’s a nice trout. I’ve been watching him feed.”

  She hitched closer to me. “Where? I don’t see any fish.”

  I pointed. “See that boulder?”

  She put her face alongside my arm to peer down the length of it. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “See behind it? There’s a gray shape?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Watch it.”

  An instant later the gray shape lifted, drifted, and swirled below us. “Hey!” yelled Kat. “Oh, wow! Why don’t you go catch him?”

  I turned to look at her. “I already did.”

  “Huh? When?”

  “In my mind. Almost as good.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Fishing, I mean. You don’t even eat them. So why do it?”

  “Fishing,” I said, “is just the most fun a man can have standing up.”

  I rolled over onto my back and laced my fingers behind my neck so that I could stare up through the pine boughs to the sky.

  “What’re you looking at?”

  “Cloud shapes.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing any good. Abstractions. Cumulus and cirrus. I’m thinking.”

  “Good thoughts?”

  “No.”

  “I’m depressing you. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not you,” I said.

  She got up on her hands and knees. She scootched down low, propped up on her hands, her ass sticking up behind her. She crept toward me on hands and knees and pressed her nose against mine. She widened her eyes and said, “Shape up, Coyne.”

  I rubbed my nose back and forth against hers. “Eskimo kiss,” I said.

  “I like American kisses better,” she said. She gave me one. It lasted a long time and became complicated, what with our bodies shifting and adjusting to the contours of each other and our hands poking and stroking and further refining the fit.

  After a couple years of that, or so it seemed, her mouth drifted away from mine. She arched her neck and I accepted the invitation. I kissed her throat and she moaned the way babies do when they are sleeping.

  I found the little hollow at the junction of her throat and chest. I flicked it with my tongue. “Salty,” I said.

  “Good honest sweat,” she murmured. “Wanna move to the blanket?”

  I eased away from her and sat up. “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  She smiled and reached up to brush some pine needles off my pants. “Here?”

  “No. Not here, either.”

  She rolled into
a cross-legged position. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s me,” I said. I lit a cigarette.

  “You wanted me. I could tell.”

  “Sure did. Still do.”

  “Then…?”

  “Forget it, Kat.”

  “Jesus, Brady. Are you some kind of prude or something? I never figured you for a prude. Some kind of hangup because you’re my lawyer? Christ, this is the twentieth century, you know.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m a prude.”

  “But that’s not really it, is it?”

  “Look,” I said. “You want honesty? Okay. The truth is, I don’t feel like participating in your experiment, that’s all.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Answer me a couple questions.”

  “Sure.”

  “When was the last time you had sex with a man?”

  She opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it. She shook her head. “A long, long time ago,” she whispered.

  “Your marriage. What went wrong with it? I met your Chuck. A nice guy.”

  “It just didn’t work.”

  “What about the sex part, Kat?”

  She nodded. “That’s what didn’t work. I couldn’t… He… See, I get to a point and…”

  I hitched myself closer to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She twitched and went rigid. “Kat, listen. It’s no fancy moralistic code of honor. Nothing like that. I’m as dishonorable as the next guy. I can outwit my superego more often than not. And you are a most desirable woman. Okay? So supposing we moved to the blanket and proceeded as we had begun. Remember the night at your condo?”

  She nodded. “Of course I remember. I told you—”

  “If that happened again—”

  “But maybe it wouldn’t. This time I felt…” She closed her eyes. “I was almost there.”

  “Supposing it worked, or whatever verb we might choose. That would be special for you, wouldn’t it?”

  She smiled shyly. “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, see, I couldn’t share that with you. I don’t want to be your hero. I don’t want you to fall in love with me because we succeeded in—”

  “You are a bastard,” she said.

  I nodded. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. When we make love—if we should ever do that—it would be because we both had the same understanding about it. Maybe because it’s fun. Maybe because we love each other. We’d have to agree. But not because it’s a grim undertaking. I’d never agree to that. I’m not into grim undertakings. Not when it comes to sex. There’s enough grimness in the rest of our lives, I’m not your man for that, Kat. Sorry.”

  “But you don’t…” She stopped and hugged herself. Then she nodded. “I appreciate your honesty,” she said stiffly. She stood up and went back to the blanket. I followed her.

  We stuffed what was left of the cheese, bread, grapes, and beer back into the paper bag. We picked up the corners of the blanket and shook it and carried the stuff back to the car.

  I followed secondary roads all the way south to the Massachusetts border. Kat said nothing, nor did I. I found Route 2, still called the Mohawk Trail at its westernmost end, and pointed my BMW east.

  Somewhere around Orange, Kat said in a small voice, “I suppose you’re right.”

  In Fitchburg she said, “I am kinda screwed up.”

  Near Fort Devens in Ayer she added, “But you’re no prize yourself.”

  “I never claimed to be.”

  When we turned onto 495 heading north to Newburyport, she shifted in her seat so that she was facing forward, her back no longer turned toward me. “Did you find out what you wanted?” she said.

  “About Maggie?”

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged. “I think so.”

  “The girl you saw in North Carolina—she was Maggie’s daughter?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “So that lawyer—Greenberg—came looking for her.”

  I nodded.

  “And he killed her?”

  “Or she killed him. I don’t know. That’s the connection.”

  “I still don’t get who—”

  “Right. They couldn’t have killed each other. That still puzzles me.”

  “And the woman, Andrea. How does she fit in?”

  “The police seem to think her husband murdered her.”

  “Because she and Marc…”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  Passing through Georgetown on 133, a shortcut I knew, Kat said, “So it’s all wrapped up then, huh?”

  “As far as I’m concerned it is,” I said.

  As far as the police were concerned, of course, nothing was wrapped up. They had a decent circumstantial case against Al Pavelich. They had serious suspicions about Marc Winter in Maggie’s death. They had, as far as I knew, not a damn thing on the knifing of Nathan Greenberg.

  Three murders on the North Shore within a little more than a week of each other. Three victims with connections to each other. Three different local jurisdictions. Three different state police detectives investigating. Three different murder weapons, none recovered.

  Maggie in the boat with a club. Greenberg in his bed with a knife. Andy Pavelich on the back deck with a gun.

  It was beginning to sound like a game of Clue.

  I called state police detective Moran the next morning and told her what I had learned from my visit with Maggie Winter’s mother in Vermont. Moran claimed to find my information interesting and she thanked me in a definitive, final sort of way that conveyed her relief that my role in her case had terminated.

  Which was okay by me.

  I told Julie I was done with sleuthing and celebrated my liberation by buying her linguini with clam sauce at Marie’s. In the afternoon I talked to clients and attorneys on the telephone, and when I thought I’d done enough of that to earn it, I called Doc Adams to set up a bass fishing trip.

  I had a nice evening planned out for myself. I’d take about three fingers of Jack Daniel’s in a big tumbler with plenty of ice out onto my balcony and watch the sea grow purple. Then I’d slide a frozen pizza into the microwave, timing it so that it would be ready at the same time as Jack Morris threw his first pitch to the Red Sox leadoff man on channel 38. Unless the Sox did some hitting I’d probably switch it off in the third or fourth inning, find something baroque on WCRB-FM, and fabricate some deerhair bass bugs for my trip with Doc. I’d flick on the TV news at eleven to see if Iran had finally succeeded in pissing off the entire Congress of the United States and to learn the magnitude of the Red Sox defeat in Detroit.

  Then I’d shuck off my clothes, letting them fall wherever they wanted, and I’d take a long warm shower, from which I would tumble directly into my bed.

  All of this was possible because I had no further interest in those North Shore murders. They were puzzles, all right. But they no longer puzzled me, because I had stopped thinking about them.

  Somewhere between the Jack Daniel’s and the pizza a guy named Ernie Cooper called me, and that nice quiet evening at home went right down the tubes.

  16

  I ALMOST DIDN’T ANSWER the phone. But I thought it might be Sylvie Szabo, returned early from her book promotion tour of the West Coast. Sylvie liked frozen pizza and the Red Sox, and she did exclaim wonderfully about the bass bugs and other flies that I liked to create.

  Besides, after Kat, Sylvie’s uncomplicated, fun-loving approach to lovemaking would have been welcome.

  So I picked up the receiver and said, “Coyne’s house.”

  There was a hesitation on the other end. Then a soft man’s voice said, “Is this the lawyer?”

  I sighed. “Yeah. Who’re you?”

  “Desmond Winter’s lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need a lawyer?”

  “Well, yes. But specifically I need you.”


  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Cooper. Ernie Cooper.”

  “Okay, Mr. Cooper. What’s on your mind?”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I muttered. “Call me at my office, then. My secretary will make an appointment for you.”

  “No. I have to see you now. Tonight.”

  “Sorry. Can’t make it.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Well, hell, man, of course I don’t understand. But I do know that it’s after office hours and I’m sitting here in stocking feet looking at a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s—”

  “Look,” he said. “Please. This thing has been eating at me ever since… Okay. Ever since Maggie was murdered. I’ve been carrying this thing around inside of me, feels like a shotput in my gut, and I finally decided I had to talk to somebody. And now I’ve got to do it. I can’t hold it in any more.”

  “Did you kill Maggie? Is that it?”

  “Oh, God, no.”

  “But you know who did, then.”

  “No. I don’t know. I assumed Marc…”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s what I want to talk about. Will you meet me?”

  I took a deep breath and blew it out. “Ah, shit. Yeah. Sure. Where?”

  He paused. “I live in Newburyport. I’d just as soon not be seen by anybody who knows me. There’s a place near the beach on Plum Island—”

  “No dice,” I said quickly. “Someplace public.”

  “Why? Oh, I get it. You think—”

  “I think nothing particular. Three murders and I get cautious. Meet me at the Grog. The upstairs bar.”

  “Everybody goes to the Grog. Someone’ll see us.”

  “Unless you want to wait until tomorrow morning in my office, you’ll have to take that chance.”

  “All right. The Grog, then. How long will it take you to get here?”

  “An hour.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “What do you look like, Mr. Cooper?”

  “You won’t have any trouble recognizing me, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’m bald as an egg.”

  He was sitting at the far corner of the four-sided upstairs bar at the Grog and he was right. Bald as an egg. He wore dark-rimmed glasses perched on a bulbous nose. He had a generous overbite and not much chin to speak of.