Tight Lines

by William G. Tapply

  “You’re a thorough man, Jack.”

  He shrugged. “Something about this Costello guy doesn’t seem right,” he said quietly. “Nothing I can put my finger on.”

  “You don’t think he did it?”

  “Oh, I guess he probably did it, all right. Everything points to it. You know, when a wife dies, it’s almost always the husband. Especially in this situation.”

  “Occam’s razor,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  I smiled. “The simple explanations are the best ones. The commonest things most commonly happen. Sure. Let me get dressed and we can go over.”

  “Take your time,” he said. “I’m gonna have more of your coffee.”

  We drove to Beacon Street in Sylvestro’s unmarked Ford LTD. He had a passkey, so we went directly in the front door, past the security desk, and down the stairs to Jill’s little basement apartment. A uniformed policeman was standing outside her door. Sylvestro nodded to him and he stepped aside to let us in.

  I stood there inside the doorway and looked around. “What am I looking for?” I said to Sylvestro.

  “I don’t know. Try to remember what it looked like when you were here. Try to see if anything’s different. Out of place, missing, whatever. Just, anything that strikes you, don’t judge it. Just tell me.”

  A crude outline of a human body had been chalked onto the linoleum in the kitchen. That hadn’t been there before. I didn’t think I needed to tell Sylvestro that. And a dark blotch the size of a bath mat stained the area around that chalked sketch, and shards of broken glass glittered in the dried puddle. A wine bottle stood beside the sink.

  “The wine,” I said. “The broken glass. How do you see it?”

  “She was pouring them wine. The bottle was less than half full, so I’d guess she was getting them refills by the sink. When she turned to face him, that’s when he stabbed her. She dropped the glasses, they shattered, and then she slumped onto the floor. She died quick, the ME figures. And there wasn’t that much blood. Her heart didn’t have much of a chance to pump a lot of it out.”

  “Looks like a lot to me,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You should see it sometimes.”

  I looked around the dining area. Her books and notebooks and yellow pads and pencils had been shoved to one side of the table, just the way she had done when I visited her, so that there’d be a place for us to put our elbows and drinks while we talked. I pointed that out to Sylvestro. He nodded.

  In the corner of the living room was a small rolltop desk and beside it a two-drawer file cabinet. Neither appeared to have been rifled. Her sofa was opened into a bed and neatly made.

  I stood there in the middle of the living-room area and looked around. Then I turned to Sylvestro. I shrugged. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Except for the broken glass and the—the blood…”

  “It’s hard. I want you to try to remember. I’m interested in knowing if something’s missing, or out of place.”

  “I know. I’ve only been here a couple times. Always at night. We just sat in the kitchen. I haven’t even really been in this part of the place.”

  “Go through it again.”

  I did. Then I shrugged again. “Nothing.”

  Sylvestro nodded. “Okay. Thanks for trying.”

  “She was really afraid of him.”

  “The husband?”

  I nodded. “You figure he came in the private entrance?”

  “Must have. There’s a security guy upstairs all the time. None of them saw anybody.”

  “The husband knew about the side entrance,” I said. “That’s where he bushwhacked me.”

  I wandered through the place again, ending up in the kitchen staring down at Jill’s outline on the floor. I looked up at Sylvestro and shrugged.

  “Any thoughts at all, Brady?” he said. “I mean, aside from what you see—or don’t see—here?”

  “Well, the obvious one. That Mary Ellen Ames, who lived upstairs, is dead. Maybe murdered, maybe not. And Jill Costello, who lived here, got murdered. Both of them young women, attractive, living alone in the same building.”

  “What was the connection between them?”

  “As far as I know, just what I told you.”

  “They were—lovers,” said Sylvestro.

  I nodded.

  “That’s something, I guess,” he said. “Oh, well. I’ll take you home, Brady. Give it some thought. If you don’t mind, come by the station tomorrow morning so we can take a deposition, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “In the meantime, give it some thought.”

  “I will.”

  “We’ll want to know all about your encounter with John Francis Costello, and anything the lady might’ve told you about him. And anything else that occurs to you. People she might’ve mentioned, problems in her life. You know.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  We left the apartment and went up to the lobby. We started for the front door. I stopped. “Jack, do me a favor.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Let me into Mary Ellen’s apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to see it again.”

  “Okay. Why not.”

  We took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Sylvestro unlocked the door to 4-B. He went in first. I followed him. I switched on the light. It was exactly as it had been when Jill brought me there. I went over and stared at the bigger-than-life portrait of Charles Ames that hung in its place of honor over the piano. It showed the upper half of his body. His head was turned in three-quarter profile. He had a noble nose, wide-set eyes slightly downturned at the outside corners, a firm chin, and a head of steely hair combed straight back from a high forehead. He was wearing a brown three-piece suit. One fist was propped on his hip. In his other hand he was holding an open book. I put my face close to the painting. The artist had not bothered to make any of the words on the book legible.

  I went back to where Sylvestro was standing by the doorway. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “That’s it?”

  I nodded.

  He frowned, then shrugged, and we left.

  Sylvestro dropped me off in front of my apartment building. It was a few minutes after nine on a sun-drenched Sunday morning in late October.

  “Have a good day,” he said as I slid out of the car.

  “Don’t see how,” I said. “It didn’t start off that good.”

  “I’m sorry about the girl.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, me too. It’ll hit me later, probably.”

  “Good idea to be with friends today, Brady.”

  “You’re probably right. What about you?”

  He smiled. “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said.

  30

  MONDAY MORNING I CALLED Sylvestro from my apartment and then went to the station to give my deposition into a tape recorder. He and a young assistant district attorney took turns asking me a lot of questions and I answered them as fully and truthfully as I could. It took about two hours.

  I got to the office a little after eleven. Julie greeted me coldly—her way of commenting on the unexcused tardiness of my arrival at work—until I piled all my completed paperwork upon her desk. Then she gave me a grudging smile. I went into my office, where a day’s worth of chores was waiting for me. I dug into it, grateful for it. The day passed and Julie never asked how my weekend had been, and I never told her.

  On Tuesday I tried to call Susan Ames. Terri answered the phone.

  “Hello, General,” I said, “it’s Brady.”

  “Well, hi.” I thought I detected real warmth in her voice. “How are you?”

  “All right. How’s Susan doing?”

  “Not good. I guess she had a bad weekend. She’s staying in bed now. She’s allowing the doctor to keep her medicated. There’s a lot of pain. She mostly sleeps.”

  “I should get out there to visit her.”

&
nbsp; “She probably wouldn’t know you were there.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Yes. Ever since she heard about Mary Ellen it’s been pretty much downhill. Downhill steep and fast.”

  I sighed. “She was something when she was well.”

  “I know. Full of energy and life.”

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

  “Thanks.”

  I followed Jack Sylvestro’s advice in my own way. I tried to help my clients. I tried to focus on their mundane legal problems, tried to keep in mind that, to my clients, their problems weren’t mundane at all. Solving them would make them happy. That was something I could do.

  When I got back to my apartment on Tuesday, it was nearly seven. The message light on my answering machine was blinking. One message. I depressed the button.

  “Hey, Mr. Coyne. It’s Finn, huh? Look, this time I really gotta talk to you. I think I got it. Mary Ellen, I mean. It’s like, uh, five o’clock maybe. I can’t keep—see, I’m here alla time, so just, if you can, come on out here. Big pain in the ass for you, I know, but—shit, anytime, really. Sooner the better. Can’t say much, these nice folks’ kitchen, you know. Come on. I’ll give you a beer, we can talk.”

  I doubted that Dave Finn had anything new to tell me. He was just a lonely man in need of company. He had lost his job and the woman he loved was dead and he was living alone in a cruddy trailer in the woods.

  I decided to go see him anyway.

  So I changed my clothes, gobbled a peanut butter sandwich over the kitchen sink, and around seven-thirty I was in my car headed for Finn’s trailer in Townsend. I hoped I’d find him reasonably sober.

  There wasn’t much traffic, so I got to the turnoff by the lumberyard around eight-thirty. I found the turn past the duck pond, took the left after the third bungalow, and drove up the hill. I passed only one car on the country road, that one traveling too fast in the opposite direction.

  When I pulled up in front of Finn’s trailer, the orange lights from the two small windows in front seemed unnaturally bright, and they appeared to be flickering strangely. When I got out of the car I smelled the smoke.

  I ran to the door and ripped it open. Heat and smoke and the poisonous odor of burning plastic burst through the door at me with a force that staggered me backward. Finn’s tin box was an incinerator. I dropped to my hands and knees and crept back to the doorway. The heat was a powerful, almost physical force, but I forced myself to stick my head inside. I was able to see that the flame seemed to be coming from the kitchen area. That electric space heater had evidently either overheated or ignited something. I yelled, “Dave! Are you in there?”

  I had to pull back. Opening the door had fed oxygen to the fire, and even as I watched, the flames rose against the wall and rolled across the ceiling in a fiery wave. I pulled my jacket up over my face, got down onto my stomach, and crept through the doorway. Now the fire was blazing. I squinted through the smoke and looked around the inside of the trailer. And I saw his leg through the smoky haze at the opposite end of the trailer from the kitchen. He was on his cot, in a half-sitting position. His back leaned against the wall and one leg dangled over the side. He was either asleep or he had passed out. “Dave!” I screamed. “Wake up! Hey! Wake up!”

  He didn’t move. He was obviously unconscious. I was gagging on the smoke and vile fumes that were filling Finn’s tin box, and the heat was intensifying by the second. But I had to get Dave Finn out of there. I crawled all the way into the trailer. By keeping my face close to the floor, I found enough air to breathe. Even with my jacket pulled up over my mouth, my lungs burned and I hacked and gagged on the fumes I was inhaling. My throat felt as if a Brillo pad was stuck in it. I hitched myself to the cot. My eyes were watering so badly that I could barely see. The heat burned on my back as if my clothes were aflame. I squeezed Finn’s leg. “Wake up,” I wheezed. He didn’t stir. I yanked at his leg. “Dave,” I rasped. “Hey. Come on.” He didn’t respond. His leg moved limply in my grasp. I didn’t bother wasting any more of my precious breath yelling at him. I pulled on him until he flopped off the cot, and then I kept pulling on his leg as I crawled backward, dragging Dave Finn behind me.

  I backed out of the door, then reached in and got both of his legs. I pulled him out onto the ground and dragged him away from the trailer. I crouched there on my hands and knees on the pine needles. I gasped for breath. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I coughed and gagged. Then my stomach bucked and flipped. I puked my peanut butter sandwich onto the ground and then kept trying to bring up more. It seemed as if I’d never stop retching.

  The flames were now darting from every seam and orifice in the trailer. I managed to get myself under control enough to tow Finn farther away from that incinerator. It occurred to me that there was probably a propane tank mounted on the outside wall of the trailer that could explode.

  I knelt beside Finn. He lay very still on the pine needles. He did not appear to have been burned. But he didn’t move. I put my face close to his. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I laid my ear against his chest. I detected no heartbeat. I slapped his face. “Come on!” I screamed. “Wake up! Breathe!”

  I pounded on his chest, and listened again. Nothing.

  I rolled him over and pressed on his back in my best imitation of CPR. After a few tries I listened again. No breathing. No heartbeat.

  I wrestled him onto his back and tried mouth-to-mouth. I thumped his chest. I slapped his face. I yelled at him. I was only vaguely aware that the trailer had become a great ball of flame. The fire roared with the din of a powerful waterfall. Fireballs and embers shot into the sky. Needles on nearby pine trees burst into flame, sparked brightly, and died quickly. And I kept pounding on Dave Finn’s chest and trying to blow air into his lungs.

  I don’t know how long I kept at it. I never heard the sirens and I didn’t notice when the trucks arrived. A man came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my chest. “That’s good work, buddy,” he said soothingly. “Come on, now. We’ll take it from here.”

  He helped me to stand and wrestled me away from Finn. I collapsed on the ground. Then I began to cough and gag again, and when I puked this time the EMT held me and murmured to me the way my mother used to when I was a child. When I finished heaving and spasming, the EMT wiped my face with a soft cloth. “How we doing, pal?” he said.

  “I’m all right,” I croaked. “How’s Finn? Is he okay?”

  “We’re working on him. Want to try to stand up?”

  “Sure.” I pushed myself to my hands and knees. Another wave of nausea came over me. I tried to vomit. Nothing came up. I hacked and gasped. Then I took several deep breaths. “I think I’m okay now,” I said.

  He helped me onto my feet. The earth tipped and swirled under me. He guided me over to the ambulance and sat me on the ground so that my back was resting against the side of the vehicle. He reached through the open doors in back and came out with a plastic bottle. He handed it to me. “Just water. Sip it slowly.”

  I took small mouthfuls. It was cool and it tingled almost painfully in my mouth. I forced myself to swallow tiny amounts of it. My throat felt as if it had swollen shut. While I was drinking, my EMT wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. He puffed it up and let it out, studying the dial. Then he took my pulse.

  “Am I going to live?” I said.

  “You’re fine, pal. I’m gonna check on your friend.”

  He went over to where Finn was being worked on by two other EMTs. I sipped water and watched.

  My EMT came back. I noticed for the first time that he was very young. It didn’t look as if he had even begun shaving. “How is he?” I said.

  He shook his head. “It don’t look good. How’re you feeling now?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He squinted at me, then nodded. “Okay. Come on. Let’s move aside, then. We gotta get your friend to the hospital.”

  The EMT helped me to
stand up. My dizziness had passed. He looked at me. “All right?”

  I nodded. “I’m fine. Really.”

  He went over to Finn. In a minute he and his two partners came back to the ambulance. They had Dave Finn on a stretcher. One of them was holding a plastic bottle in the air. It had a tube that was connected to Finn’s arm. A plastic oxygen mask covered his mouth. They slid him into the back. One EMT climbed in behind him. The other two slammed shut the doors and went around to the front. A moment later the ambulance roared away.

  A fire truck was pulled up close to the trailer. They seemed to have the fire just about extinguished. I sipped water and watched them work. A few minutes later I heard a siren, and then a police cruiser skidded to a stop in the road.

  Two uniformed cops got out. One of them went over to talk with the firemen. The other approached me. “You a witness to this?” he said.

  I nodded. “Sort of.”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  I told him.

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged. “I came to visit my friend. Dave Finn. He was living in the trailer. When I got here, it was on fire. I dragged Dave out. I don’t know. Then the fire trucks arrived…”

  “It was on fire when you got here?”

  “Yes. He had one of those electric space heaters in there. When I got here, the fire was in that end. Where the kitchen is. It looked as if that space heater overheated or something. Finn—Dave—he drank a lot. He was on his cot.” I shrugged.

  “Like he might’ve passed out before the fire started?”

  I nodded.

  “Kind of a warm night for a space heater,” he said.

  I shrugged. “He had a lot on his mind.”

  It sounded like a non sequitur when I said it, but the cop just nodded. He looked at me closely. “You all right?”

  “I’m okay. The EMT checked me over.”

  “Gonna be able to drive?”

  “I think so.”

  “You saved the guy, huh?”

  “I don’t know. I got him out of there and tried to revive him, but…”

  “You tried, anyhow.”

  “Is he going to…?”

  “I don’t know. You got a driver’s license?”