He frowned. His eyebrows were as white as the hair on top of his head. “Boy, now that I think of it, it’s been a while. Lemme think.” He scratched his chin and peered up at the ceiling. “Hm,” he said. “Couple weeks, I’ll bet. Never really noticed. They come and go. Most of ’em have other places to live, too. You know, Florida or Killington in the winter, Nantucket, Chatham in the summer. I don’t keep track of them.”
“Does Mary Ellen Ames have a vacation place?”
He shrugged. “Seems to me she does. Couldn’t tell you where.”
“A couple weeks, huh?”
“Now, that just means I haven’t seen her. I’m off at seven, back again seven in the morning. She could be comin’ in and goin’ out when I’m not here.”
I handed him one of my cards. “Do me a favor,” I said. “When you see her, give me a call?”
He took the card. “I guess I could do that. I mean, if her mother’s dying…”
“Something else,” I said. “Will you deliver a note to her for me?”
“I can leave it in her mailbox, sure.”
I took a sheet of my business stationery from my attaché case. I wrote on it: “Ms. Ames, Your mother is dying of cancer. She hasn’t much time left. She wants to see you. I need to discuss her estate with you. Please call me at your earliest convenience. Yours truly, Brady L. Coyne, Esq.”
I folded it, slipped it into an envelope, wrote “Mary Ellen Ames” on the outside, and handed it to Harold Wainwright. He took it over to a row of slots on the wall beside the desk and shoved it through one of them.
“Is there a regular night man on duty here?” I said to him.
He nodded. “Young fella named Donald. He comes on at seven.”
“One more favor, then,” I said. “Tell him I plan to stop by tonight. See if you can persuade him to cooperate with me.”
He nodded. “I can do that, sure. Can’t guarantee he will cooperate, you understand. But I’ll tell him.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We shook hands and I left.
As I was descending the path, a mailman pushed open the gate and walked past me. I turned around. “Excuse me,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me. “Meaning me?”
“Yes. Do you have any mail for Ames?”
He didn’t bother to check. “Nope,” he said.
“You sure?”
“Positive, friend. It’s being held at the post office.”
“When did she request that?”
“She didn’t.”
“Has she moved or something?”
“Nope. Takes about two magazines to fill up one of them little boxes. Can’t cram anything else into it.”
“She hasn’t been picking up her mail, then?”
“Nossir. Not for two or three weeks. I’m holding it for her. Left her a memo telling her we got it when she wants it.”
I nodded. “Well, thank you.”
He shrugged. “You betcha.”
6
I SAUNTERED BACK TOWARD Copley Square, dangling my jacket on my forefinger over my shoulder. By the time I got to Clarendon Street I’d worked up another sweat. But I wasn’t pondering environmental disasters. I was trying to figure out how I was going to reach Mary Ellen Ames.
She hadn’t been home in about two weeks. Nobody seemed to know where she was.
It had been nearly a week since I had talked with Susan. That meant she was a week closer to death.
When I got back to the office I called Susan’s house in Concord. Terri Fiori answered. “Susan Ames’s residence,” she said.
“Good day, General. It’s Brady Coyne.”
“Oh, hi, Mr. Coyne. How are you?”
“Brady.”
“Yes. Brady.”
“I’m fine. How’s Susan?”
“Oh, about the same. She tires quickly. She’s napping now.”
“Well, don’t bother her. If you don’t mind, just tell her that I’ve found that Mary Ellen is living on Beacon Street, but I haven’t been able to catch up with her yet.”
“I’ll tell her,” she said. “She’s been talking about her daughter a lot lately. Since you were here.”
“I understand. I’m doing my best.”
“Look, Brady,” she said.
“Yes?”
“When we talked before?”
“You mean when you shot me down?”
She chuckled. “Yes. When I shot you down. I feel bad.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, I don’t feel bad on your account.”
“No?”
“No. I feel bad on my account.”
“You mean…?”
“Sure. How’s this coming Friday?”
“Boy, I don’t know. I don’t bounce back well when I’ve been shot down.”
“Oh, shit,” she muttered.
“I’m just kidding. Friday would be great. Where?”
“You mind driving out here? I get off around five-thirty, I’ll need to get cleaned up, and frankly I hate to drive into the city. There’s a neat Italian place near me. Want to meet there?”
“I love Italian,” I said. And I love Italian women, I thought.
She told me how to find a little place in Acton called Ciao. Seven-thirty, Friday.
I fooled around with paperwork for the rest of the afternoon. I found myself humming tunes from My Fair Lady and remembering Terri Fiori’s wicked wink.
But my thoughts kept swinging back to Mary Ellen. I found myself wanting very much to bring her together with Susan. I didn’t know if she was avoiding me.
That evening, after a microwaved Salisbury steak, green beans, and mashed potato and gravy dinner, I walked from my apartment on the harbor back to Beacon Street. With the sun down the air had quickly chilled. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt and my running shoes. Not that I ran. I don’t run. Ever. As Mel Brooks’s 2000-year-old man advised, never run for a bus. There’ll always be another.
I didn’t work up a sweat at all. So much for global warming.
I climbed the steps and for the second time that day entered Mary Ellen Ames’s Beacon Street building. I peered through the glass door. A young guy was sitting where Harold Wainwright had sat earlier. Donald, I presumed. He was thumbing through a magazine and drumming his fingers on the desktop. I rang the bell. He looked up and saw me.
“Yeah?” came his voice from above me.
“Brady Coyne. To see Mary Ellen Ames.”
“Just a sec.” Like Harold, Donald picked up the telephone and pecked at the buttons of his console. Like Harold, he waited a moment and then replaced the receiver. “Nope. No answer.”
“You’re Donald?”
“Yup.”
“I was here earlier. I asked Mr. Wainwright to tell you…”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. Right. Hang on.”
He got up and sauntered over. He opened the door. “Come on in.”
I went in and followed him across the lobby. He resumed his seat behind the desk. A transistor radio sat on the corner. It was playing a rap song, if “song” is the right word. He switched it off. “So what’s up?” he said. “Old Harold said you were trying to get ahold of Ames. She ain’t in now.”
“It’s really important,” I said. “I’m her mother’s lawyer. She’s dying of cancer and I have to talk to Mary Ellen.”
“Yeah. That’s a bitch.” He shrugged. “Don’t know what I can tell you.”
“When was the last time you saw her, can you remember?”
He was in his early twenties. He had a pasty complexion and a scrawny neck and a fuzzy adolescent mustache. I suspected he was holding at that moment the most important job he’d ever have in his life. He closed his eyes for a moment, pretending, at least, to concentrate. Then he opened them and shrugged. “I dunno,” he said.
“I mean, recently? Tonight? Last week?”
“Not tonight, not last week. I’d notice. Nice-looking broad. Most of ’em here, they’re old. I mean, really old
, you know? They piss and moan and hobble around. The Ames chick, she’s somethin’ else.” He gave me the sort of grin that invites an answering leer. I didn’t give it to him.
“Try to remember,” I said. “It’s important.”
He shook his head slowly. “Week before last, maybe. I don’t know.”
“What about friends? Has anybody been around looking for her? Besides me, I mean?”
“Nope.” He paused. “Wait a minute. Harold said somebody came by this afternoon. After you were here. He told me to tell you that.”
“Did he get a name?”
“Nah. I guess he didn’t leave it, or Harold didn’t ask. Harold said it was one of her guys.”
“One of her guys?”
“Hey, she’s got friends. This was one of ’em. I know who it was by Harold’s description. I mean, not his name or anything. But I seen him.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Old guy. Older than you, even. Busted-up face. Like he was a boxer or something? Crooked nose, scar tissue around his eyes, pockmarks on his cheeks. Big guy. Not tall, but thick. Got these big shoulders.” He shrugged his own narrow shoulders.
“No name, occupation, anything?”
“No. I seen this guy come and go with her a lot. That’s it.”
“And he was here today?”
“So says Harold. The way he described him, must be the same guy.”
“This is the only man you’ve seen her with, then?”
He grinned. “Hell, no. Like I said, she’s got plenty of friends. There’s this other guy comes around a lot. Shit, he’s nearly as old as Harold, I bet. This old hippie. Bald, earring, big long gray ponytail hanging down his back. Weird old dude.”
“No name for him, either.”
“Nope. And there are others. I don’t remember any of them. I mean, none of the others spend the night, dig?”
“But these two do? The boxer and the hippie?”
He grinned. “Wouldn’t you?”
I let that one pass. “Is there a superintendent in the building?”
“Sure. That’d be Jill. Speaking of bitches.”
“I’d like to talk to her.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Would you mind buzzing her for me?”
“Hey, it’s your funeral, mister.”
He picked up the phone, poked a few buttons, and said, “Hey, Jill. A guy’s here wants to talk to you.” He paused, listening. Then he said, “I dunno. Some lawyer.”
He frowned at the receiver for a minute, then lifted his eyebrows to me. “She wants to know if you’re her husband’s lawyer.”
“No.”
“Nope,” he said into the telephone. “He says no.” He hesitated. “Yeah, all right.”
He hung up. “She said she’d be up.”
“Thanks.”
He looked down at his magazine. Sports Illustrated. After a minute he snapped his radio back on.
“Goddamn it, Donald,” came a voice from behind me. “You are not supposed to let people into the lobby and you are not supposed to be playing a radio.”
I turned around. She was short and slender and angry. Her straight blond hair fell halfway down her back. Her jeans were tight. Her man’s blue oxford shirt was untucked and hung loosely over her hips. Her icy blue eyes blazed. I guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She could have passed for a teenager.
Donald snapped off his radio. “Uh, sorry, Jill. Harold said this guy was okay.”
“Yeah, well Harold is just a security guard like you, and his job is to maintain the security of this building, just like yours is. Neither of you is doing a very good job of it, and neither of you is what you’d call a shrewd judge of character.” She turned her head and pierced me with those cold eyes. “And you. You’re a lawyer, huh?”
“Yes. Brady Coyne. I—”
“You represent John Francis Costello, right? That sonofabitch sent you here with a bunch of papers, and you’re supposed to sweet-talk me into signing them. Well, forget it.”
“I never heard of any Costello,” I said.
She cocked her head at me and frowned. “No, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“No subpoena or anything?”
I shook my head.
She shrugged. “Well, shit. Sorry, then.” She turned again to Donald. “That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to let anybody who says he’s a lawyer into this building, and I don’t care what Harold says. You know your job.”
Donald succeeded in stifling the beginnings of a sarcastic smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Jill Costello,” she said to me. “I’m the super here. What’s up?”
I darted my eyes in Donald’s direction. “Can we talk somewhere?”
“Sure. I guess. Come on.”
She turned and I followed her into a corridor. She stopped where it opened into a stairwell. She fumbled a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket, got one lit, blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling, and said, “Look. I’m sorry about that back there. I’m behind in my studies, everybody’s air conditioners are on the blink, and Johnny Costello is on my case. Okay?”
I smiled. “No problem.”
“So you wanted to talk to me?”
I nodded. “I’m trying to contact Mary Ellen Ames. She lives in this building. I’m her mother’s attorney. Susan Ames. She’s got cancer. They give her maybe a month. She and her daughter have been estranged for eleven years, and Susan is very anxious to see Mary Ellen. There’s the matter of the estate, which is substantial and complex. And mainly, I think Susan just wants to give her daughter a hug before she goes.”
As I spoke I watched the angry tension drain away from Jill Costello’s face. Her mouth softened, and a glisten of tears doused the angry flames in her pale blue eyes.
“Ah, shit,” she mumbled. “Ah, that sucks. Damn.”
I touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry if…”
She wiped her wrist across her eyes. “No, see…” She snuffled into her shirtsleeve. “Ah, nuts.” She looked up at me. “I’m just kinda strung out these days.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, the truth is, my mom died a little over a year ago. She had a stroke. The doctors said she was gonna be okay, and I was in the middle of exams, preoccupied with Johnny, and so when—when she died, here I was in Boston, and her in some crummy hospital in Philadelphia, and I—I never even got to say good-bye to her.”
Then the tears spilled out of her eyes. “Ah, dammit. Jeez,” she muttered. She leaned her forehead against my chest. I patted her back awkwardly. Her arms snaked around my waist and she pressed herself against me. I could feel her shaking and shuddering. I hugged her against me and let her cry.
After a minute or two she snorted and stood back from me. “Thanks for the hug,” she said huskily. “Boy, it’s been a long time since I had one of them.”
“My pleasure.”
“I thought I was all over that.”
“It speaks well for you that you’re not.”
“You touched a nerve. Pretty obviously. God, I wouldn’t wish something like that on anybody. You live with the guilt forever, I guess. You know, I keep thinking if I’d only gotten there, maybe she wouldn’t have died. Or at least she wouldn’t have died alone. And your friend. Not seeing her daughter all these years, and knowing she’s going to die…”
“Do you know her?”
“Miz Ames?” She looked up at the ceiling. “I guess I’d recognize her. I’ve fixed a couple things in her place, but not when she was there. No, I couldn’t say I knew her.”
“Well, I really need to talk to her. I’ve been calling, and all I get is her machine. The post office has stopped leaving her mail because she hasn’t been taking it from her box. Neither of your security men has seen her for over a week.” I reached for her and touched her arm. “Can you help me?”
She looked up at me. Her blue eyes were not icy now. “You want to go up, check
out her place, is that it?”
“Yes. Can we?”
She narrowed her eyes for a moment. Then she said, “Screw the rules. Let’s go.”
She took a final drag on her cigarette then ground it out under her sneaker on the marble floor. She took my hand and led me back toward the lobby. Suddenly she stopped. “God,” she said. “I just had this awful thought.”
“What?”
“What if—what if there’s a body up there?”
I smiled at her. “Don’t be silly,” I said.
But I’d been having the same thought myself.
7
WE GOT INTO THE elevator at the back of the lobby. It was one of the old-fashioned kind, with accordion barred doors that had to be opened and closed manually, and it moved up through the building slowly. It gave me time to imagine what we might find in Mary Ellen’s rooms.
I have friends who are homicide detectives. They have described for me in gleefully colorful language the odor a human corpse gives off after a few days in a heated and poorly ventilated room. They have told me how a body bloats, how it discolors, how houseflies lay their eggs on it and how those eggs hatch into maggots. They have described bodies that were found hanging by the neck, how the eyes bulge, and bodies that left impossibly large puddles of dried black blood on a linoleum floor, and bodies that drowned in bathtubs, and bodies that lay in bed for weeks after they had ceased functioning.
I tried not to think about dead bodies. The harder I tried, naturally, the more vivid became the images that whirled in my brain.
Jill Costello stood beside me, operating the elevator. The top of her head didn’t quite reach my shoulder. She was staring up at the blinking lights. I hoped, for her sake, that she didn’t have friends who were homicide detectives.
The elevator opened into a large square hallway. Four doors opened onto it. Jill led me to the one marked 4-B. She paused outside it, then rapped on it with her knuckles. “Mary Ellen. It’s Jill. Can I come in for a minute?”
She stood with her head cocked to the side for a minute. Then she looked up at me and shrugged. “Let’s go in.”
She took a ring of keys from her pocket, twisted one of them in the lock, and turned the knob. The door swung inward. It didn’t come up against a chain lock. This I took as a small positive sign.
Tight Lines Page 4