“Kat had her baby, a healthy girl. After her recuperation she and Connie headed home. This was in November, six months after they had left. They took the train. At some point during those six months, Connie had made a decision. She decided that Des had to know. On the train ride she told Kat. They would have to tell her father that she had gone off to have a baby.”
I paused to light a cigarette. Fourier and Moran were watching me.
“They got off somewhere to change trains. They went somewhere where they happened to be alone. They argued. Kat said she didn’t want her father to know. Connie insisted. She probably didn’t know why Kat was so vehement. Anyway, Kat shoved her mother. Connie slipped and fell. She hit her head, or perhaps broke her neck. She died instantly.”
“Jesus,” said Fourier. “Fourteen-year-old girls get knocked up all the time.”
“It was an accident,” I said. “But Kat—I don’t know. She panicked, I suppose. She took her mother’s purse and got on her train. I guess they were unable to identify Connie’s body when they found it. Another Jane Doe. Anyhow, Kat went back to Des, and by the time she got there she had decided how she would play it. Connie had sent her home, that’s all. Her mother would be in touch, she told Des. That was the message. And she stuck to it. It must’ve driven her crazy, that awful secret. She dealt with it by doing all she could for her father. She tried to live up to his standards. She achieved. She took care of him. And she—for her, sex wouldn’t work. It got all mixed up with her guilt and what had brought it all on.”
I sipped my coffee. It was cold. I made a face.
“More coffee?” said Fourier.
I shook my head. “So for all these years Kat has lived with it and Des has waited for Connie to come home, and it probably would’ve continued that way until he died. Except meanwhile down in North Carolina Kat’s daughter had been adopted and was growing up and falling in love and getting married. She got pregnant. Her child was stillborn. Her doctor suspected genetic problems and tried to get a medical history of her and her husband. Lanie Horton—that’s Kat’s daughter’s name—knowing she was adopted, hired a local lawyer to track down her parents. That was—”
“Greenberg,” said Moran. “Nathan Greenberg, the guy who—”
“Right,” I said. “He thought he had it figured out. So he came to Newburyport looking for Kat. I thought it was Maggie who was Lanie’s mother. They looked alike. Tall, dark. But it was Kat. Anyway, Greenberg flew into Boston. It was on a weekend. He tried to call me, but I wasn’t in. He took a motel room in Danvers and then drove to Newburyport. He went to Des’s house and saw Maggie outside. I suppose he assumed Maggie was Kat. As I said, there was a resemblance between Maggie and Lanie Horton. Anyhow, he introduced himself and asked if she was Katherine Winter. Maggie said no, of course, but she told him how to reach Kat. I figure he called Kat and gave her an idea of what was on his mind. From what people have told me about Greenberg, he must’ve invited her to his motel. Maybe he had decided to blackmail her. Maybe he just hoped for a seduction. Maybe it was Kat’s idea that they meet there. Maybe she intended to kill him all along. Anyway, she went there with a serrated kitchen knife in her purse. They talked. Greenberg told her that he had spoken with Maggie. So after Kat killed him, she had to find Maggie, because Maggie was the only one who could link Kat with Nate Greenberg.”
“My God!” breathed Moran.
I stood up and began to move around the room. “So Kat went to the boat—”
“Please, Mr. Coyne,” said Fourier, gesturing to the chair. “The recorder.”
I nodded. “Sorry.” I sat down again. “So Kat went to the boat. I suppose she knew that’s where Maggie met her lover.” I looked up at Fourier. “Ernie Cooper?”
He nodded. “Who you brought in earlier this evening.”
“Yeah. Anyway, Kat waited until Cooper left and Maggie was alone on the boat. She picked up the priest—the club they kill fish with—and went below. Maggie was in the berth. Kat clubbed her to death. A little while later Marc came along with his lover, Andrea Pavelich. They went down and saw Maggie’s body. Marc took Andy home, then drove back and called the police.”
I stopped and slumped down in my chair.
“Coffee?” said Fourier.
I lifted my hand. “No. Give me a minute. This is hard.”
He nodded.
“You understand,” I said, “this is mostly surmise on my part. All the thinking I’ve done on it plus what Kat said to me on the phone before—before she shot herself. She had taken pills, I think. She wasn’t entirely coherent. I think you’ll find that the .22 automatic she shot herself with was the same weapon that killed Andy Pavelich.”
“Why kill her?” said Moran.
“Kat blamed Marc. She loved him and she hated him. Some twisted part of her was able to persuade her that he was the one that had caused it all and he was the one who deserved to suffer for it. She saw him as they grew up. That he didn’t seem to suffer the way she did. It was not her original intention, probably, that Marc be suspected of Maggie’s death. But when Kat realized he was, she felt it was just. So when she learned—when I told her—that Andy Pavelich was Marc’s alibi, Kat killed her, too.”
Moran nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I can see that. So why did she kill herself tonight?”
“Me,” I said, spreading my hands. “She thought I was figuring it out. And I think she was in love with me.”
“Oh, I don’t think you should—”
I nodded quickly. “I’m not. Kat was sick. Who wouldn’t be, carrying that load around for eighteen or nineteen years? Something was bound to break inside of her sometime. She was all twisted up. I just happened to come along. Still, I wish it had been somebody else.”
Fourier was staring at me. “Is that it, Mr. Coyne?”
I shrugged. “Except for one thing.”
“Go ahead.”
“The thing that made her secret so awful, the thing that her father couldn’t know, the thing that made her feel justified in killing Andrea Pavelich. Don’t you see?”
Moran and Fourier stared at me. Then Moran’s mouth opened. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Marc. I feel stupid that I didn’t see it quicker. Lanie Horton, Kat’s daughter, she’s tall and dark, just like Maggie. That’s what fooled me. But Kat is tall, too. And Marc is dark. Kat’s brother was the one that came to her bed at night. It was his baby she was carrying.”
Fourier and Moran asked me a lot of questions, which I answered as well as I could. Finally he looked at her and said, “Well, it’s really just a lot of conjecture.”
She nodded. “But it fits together better than anything else we’ve been able to come up with. And there are several things we can do to pin it down.”
“Sure. Ballistics on that .22, for one thing. We done with him?”
She looked at me. “For now.”
I waited around the Newburyport police station, drinking coffee and smoking, until Fourier brought me a typed copy of my statement. I read it through and signed it.
A policeman drove me back to Kat’s building, where I had left my car. I sat in it for a while, staring at the doorway where I had seen Kat’s body being lugged out. After a while the sky began to turn silver and the boats moored in the river changed from silhouettes to three-dimensional objects.
I started up my car and drove to Des’s house. It was something I had to do.
Marc met me at the door. He held a can of beer in his hand. He gestured with a jerk of his head for me to come in. Barney the basset was sleeping beside the stove. He opened his eyes for a moment, rolled them at me, sighed, and closed them again.
“My father’s asleep,” said Marc. “Get you something?”
I shook my head. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table. Marc stared down at the beer can he was holding in both hands.
“The doctor was here. Gave him a sedative. He’s very shook up.”
“What does he know?”
He looked up at me. “Know?”
I nodded. “What did they tell him?”
He shrugged. “That Kat shot herself. They showed him the note and he identified her handwriting. Then they took him to the hospital to identify her body. Then they brought him back and the doctor came and gave him pills. He’s upstairs.”
“Did they say anything about your mother?”
Marc frowned. “What about her?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. Just wondering.” I stared hard at him.
He returned my gaze, a puzzled look on his face. “What is it, Brady?”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Look, this has been a tough night. I’m in no mood for puzzles.”
“Where Kat and your mother went?”
“God. That was a long time ago. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Everything,” I said. “And one of us, you or I, has to decide how much to tell your father.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Well, maybe you better tell me first.”
“I’ll keep it simple. You knocked up your sister. Her mother took her south to have her baby. When Connie threatened to tell your father, Kat killed her. When her baby—hers and yours—grew up, she sent a detective looking for her parents. The detective talked to your wife. So Kat killed both of them, Maggie and Greenberg, and then she killed your girlfriend, too, just for good measure.”
Marc’s eyes never left my face. He registered no expression. After a long minute, he whispered, “I didn’t know.”
I lit a cigarette and shrugged.
“You want me to tell my father all this?”
“He’s your father.”
“He’s an old man.”
“He’s a man.”
“What good would it do to tell him?”
“That,” I said, “may not be the question.”
“She hated me, didn’t she?”
“Kat?”
He nodded.
“She probably did. And loved you, too.”
“You don’t think I suffered? Making—doing that with your own sister? Knowing what I did?”
“Kat suffered worse.”
“What do you think of me, Brady?”
“It doesn’t really matter what I think,” I said.
EPILOGUE
I TOOK THE COWARD’S way out. I got Dr. Hendrick’s phone number from Victoria Jones and called him. His secretary said he was with a patient. When I told her I was a lawyer calling from Boston, and that I had information he needed on Lanie Horton, she said she’d see if she could interrupt him.
A moment later a deep, gentle voice said, “Paul Hendrick.”
“Doctor,” I said, “my name is Brady Coyne. I’m calling about Lanie Horton.”
“Yes?” I visualized him, somehow, wearing a waistcoat and bow tie, with piercing blue eyes behind rimless glasses low on his nose, a thin white mustache, white crewcut.
“You needed a medical history on her parents.”
“Go on.”
I cleared my throat. “Her parents—her mother and father—well, they’re siblings.”
“Oh, my.”
“Well, I just wanted you to know.”
“And you wanted me to tell her.”
“I guess somebody should.”
“Doctors are good at conveying bad news, is that it?”
“Lawyers have to do that sometimes, too.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mr. Coyne. Thank you, I guess.”
Constance skimmed smoothly across the furrowed sea. After I finished filleting the three blues that we kept and stowing the tackle, I went forward and stood beside Des. He held the wheel in one confident hand, squinting through the rain-spattered windshield, straining to find the landmarks on the misted shore.
I handed him a beer. “Thank you,” he said.
“It was a good day.”
“Last one of the season, I expect. They’re schooling up for their migration. We were lucky to find them. They’ll be gone in a week.”
“You haven’t lost your nose for bluefish, Des.”
He smiled and nodded. “They showed me her picture, you know.”
I waited.
“The police. They were very kind. They got a photograph over their computer from New York. They had to know if it was her.”
“Connie?”
He nodded. “They found her in a restroom in Grand Central Station. It was November the ninth, 1971. The day Katherine came home. They couldn’t identify her. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody filed a missing person on her. Nobody went looking for her. After a while they buried her somewhere. She had a fractured skull. Jane Doe. My Connie. An anonymous corpse…”
I wondered what Marc had told him, what else he knew.
I put my arm around his shoulder. “I’m sorry, old friend.”
He shook his head. “No, don’t be. You don’t negotiate with life. You take what you get. This has been mine. I can’t complain. I have many things to be grateful for.”
He stared at the sea. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“She didn’t leave me, you see,” he said after several minutes. “I always hoped to know about that before I died. She never stopped loving me. She was coming back to me.”
He began the wide turn that would take us into the mouth of the Merrimack, to the slip in the Newburyport marina where Constance rode out storms and tides.
“The other thing I’m grateful for,” said the old man, “is the nineteen years of hope I had. I was lucky to have that.”
I sipped my beer and studied the sea. Desmond Winter considered himself a lucky man.
What did that make me?
Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries
ONE
THE JUDGE’S YOUNG CLERK made a fist, extended one knuckle, and rapped twice on the veneer panel of the door. He paused, then pushed it open. He stuck his head into the room.
“Mr. Coyne, Your Honor?” he said.
I heard no reply, but the clerk withdrew his head and nodded to me. “Go ahead in, sir,” he said.
The Honorable Chester Y. Popowski was seated behind a big desk in the corner of the large square room. The Superior Court judge’s chambers little resembled those created for television. There was some cheap wood paneling on the walls and fading maroon wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor. A glass-fronted bookcase held some thick legal tomes. The judge had fewer volumes than I had in my law office. No flagstands flanked the desk. No oil portraits hung on the walls. No rich leather furniture. It was a big room, and it looked as if its occupant had a short lease, which was true. Massachusetts Superior Court judges rotate among the various jurisdictions in the state. Pops’ tenure in Middlesex County was one year, of which he had already served seven months.
His robe hung on a coatrack beside him. His solid blue tie was loosened at his throat. He wore bright yellow suspenders. A newspaper was spread over the top of his desk, serving the dual function of tablecloth and reading matter. Pops held a cardboard container in one hand and a white plastic spoon in the other. He was looking up at me over a pair of half glasses perched low on his nose. His thick thatch of snow-white hair looked like a wig. Laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes and he was giving me his famous smile. Pops had a face that inspired faith. It was a wise face, an honest face, a confident face.
Those qualities in that face were enhanced, not contradicted, by the thin white scar on his left cheekbone. It was perhaps two inches long, and it angled from just below the outside corner of his eye toward the corner of his mouth. It was barely noticeable in the winter, but after Pops had spent some time in the sun that scar seemed to glow proudly like a battle wound.
Which, in fact, is what it was. I was with him when he got it. It was back in our law school days in New Haven. Racial tension ran high in that city, as it did in many American cities in those days, although those of us who spent our time in an ivory tower tended to perceive it as an abstraction. On that particul
ar evening, Pops, Charlie McDevitt, and I had emerged from a cheap restaurant in a marginal part of town. We had lingered after eating, debating fine points of due process and pending Supreme Court decisions, as we usually did. Charlie and I had lubricated the conversation with several shots of Old Grand-dad apiece, while Pops, typically, had sipped on a single glass of draft beer.
We carried the debate into the empty streets and continued it as we meandered toward Pops’ car, which was parked a few blocks away. Suddenly Pops yelled, “Hey! Cut it out!” and darted away from us. He ran across the street, where we could see some sort of fight in progress.
Pops piled into the middle of it. By the time Charlie and I had gathered our wits around us and followed Pops, two of the men had fled and Pops was kneeling on the chest of the remaining one. He was pounding the man’s face with his fists, mumbling “son of a bitch” and “dirty bastards,” and Charlie and I had to drag him off. As soon as we did, that man stumbled away, too, and the three of us were left alone on the sidewalk. Then we noticed the flap of skin lying open on Pops’ cheek.
He explained what had happened: he had seen two white men taking turns kicking a black teenager, who was curled fetally on the sidewalk. He had done what anybody would do, he said. He had gone to the rescue. One of the white guys had a knife, that’s all.
That was the only time I have ever seen Pops hit anybody. The only time, in fact, I have ever seen him lose control. I believe he might have killed that man with his fists had we not pulled him off.
The scar remained as a kind of symbol of Pops’ concept of justice. His face, somehow, would have been incomplete without it.
That scar and that hair and that altogether distinguished face gave Judge Popowski, unlike virtually all the other judges in the Commonwealth, instant recognizability among television viewers and other casual political observers. Pops looked like a judge. His appearance was an asset, and while he took no credit for it, he was grateful for it. He knew it gave him an advantage.
In the case of Judge Popowski, though, unlike the cases of most people, the face actually revealed the man. I knew that the Honorable Chester Y. Popowski was, in fact, distinguished, wise, honest, and confident. Honorable, even.
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