Tight Lines

by William G. Tapply

  I hung up, then turned to Robin and Warren. They were sitting close beside each other, holding hands and watching me. “He’ll be right over,” I said. “He’ll take it.”

  I went back and sat down. I lit a cigarette.

  “I’m not insane,” said Robin quietly. “I did the logical thing.”

  “Shh, honey,” said Warren softly.

  “Don’t say anything else,” I said to her. “Let’s just wait for Zerk to get here. You should tell him everything.”

  34

  ZERK ARRIVED AN HOUR and a half later. Warren and Robin and I spent the time sitting at the table. We didn’t say much. Robin and I smoked cigarettes and sipped tea. Warren just sipped tea. They sat close together, and now and then they would lean toward each other and exchange whispers. Once Robin tilted her face up to his and kissed him on the jaw.

  When the doorbell chimed I went to the door. Zerk looked athletic in his Nike sweats and black windbreaker and high-tech red-and-white sneakers. He was carrying an incongruous attaché case. “I thought that little Karen chick was sleeping, man,” he said. “But she wasn’t. Otherwise I would have got here quicker.”

  “That’s okay. I’m damn glad you could make it. Come on in.”

  I ushered him into the kitchen and introduced him to Robin and Warren. Warren offered a cup of tea and Zerk refused. He sat at the table. He looked directly at Robin. “If I’m going to take your case, Mrs. McAllister, you’ve got to tell me everything. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Start at the beginning, then,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I overheard her calls. You can hear them when the machine comes on to record them. I couldn’t help overhearing her. She sounded crazy. She kept saying she couldn’t keep going this way, that he—Warren, my husband—he was her sweet daddy and she had to have him all for herself. She wouldn’t let him leave her again. Her daddy had left her once, and she couldn’t stand it if he left her again. She called him her sweet daddy, over and over. Her sweet daddy. And she talked about when they were together at the pond, how—how good it was, how she loved him, how happy he would be when they were together forever. And then she’d change. Right in the middle of a sentence, sometimes, and she’d sound angry and nasty and mean. She said if he wouldn’t do what she wanted she’d tell me and she’d get a lawyer and sue him and she’d talk to the newspapers and the television and everyone would know. So I followed Warren up there one Sunday. He said he was going fishing. I drove past the driveway that went down to the pond and left the car by the road and went back and walked in. I snuck up to that little cottage and I could see them through the window.” She glanced at Warren. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  He patted her hand and said nothing.

  “Then what?” said Zerk.

  “I left. I didn’t know what to do. I had to think about it. After a while I knew what I had to do. So I went back the next Sunday and I waited until Warren left and then I went in there. She was in her bed all drowsy from—from what they had been doing. And I went right up to her and told her who I was. I told her she had to leave him alone, that’s all. And she laughed and said she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, that he was hers not mine. So I did the only thing I could do.” Robin glanced at Warren, then at Zerk. She shrugged.

  “What?” said Zerk. “What exactly did you do?”

  “I injected her,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “I gave her an injection.”

  “With what?”

  “VerSed.”

  “What’s VerSed?” said Zerk.

  “Benzodiazepine,” said Robin. “We use it in the emergency room. When we need to put somebody under quickly. It causes rapid sedation. I just shot it into her shoulder. Then I dragged her down to the pond. I pushed her off the end of the dock. She sank right down. She was supposed to drown. I guess she did. Then I shoved one of the canoes in and tipped it over so it filled up with water.” She shrugged. “I did the same thing to that awful man. I injected him.”

  “What man?” said Zerk.

  “Dave Finn,” I said. I looked at Robin. “Right?”

  She nodded. “Of course. He was an awful man.”

  “Why’d you kill Finn?” I said.

  “He knew about her and Warren. He called here for Warren, just the way that woman did. He just said he knew about him and her and that he had to talk to him. He said he had no phone but he left directions how to find where he was living. I erased the message and went there myself. He was surprised to see me. He was pretty drunk. I made him tell me what he knew. He knew about them. He thought Warren killed her. Said he figured it out and he was going to tell you.” She turned and looked at me. “You, Brady. He said you were on your way. He expected you any minute. I didn’t really believe that, but I couldn’t wait to see if he was lying. So I had to inject him, too.”

  “Then you set his place afire,” I said.

  She nodded. “It was easy. He had this big electric space heater.”

  “You killed two people?” said Zerk.

  “Both of them were going to tell,” she said with a shrug.

  “Wait,” I said. “What about Jill Costello?”

  “That little girl?” said Robin. “She called, left her name and a number. I knew it wasn’t one of Warren’s patients. I returned her call, said I was his wife, could I help her. At first she said no, it was personal, just have him call her. Then she was quiet for a minute, and then she said maybe she should talk to me. She told me how to get there. So I went right over. She said she figured I deserved to know about my husband. She thought I didn’t know. She’d had a bad time with her husband, and I guess she figured we were in the same boat. She didn’t seem to trust men very much. That woman had told her about Warren. I told her she mustn’t tell anybody else, but she said she couldn’t do that. She said she’d figured out that Warren killed her, you see. She said it was her duty to tell. I think she was going to tell you, Brady, just like that man in the trailer.”

  I looked at Zerk. “She stabbed her to death,” I said.

  Zerk looked at Robin. “Is that right?”

  Robin nodded. “Yes. I didn’t want her to suffer. She seemed like a nice person. But I had to do something. I made sure it was quick for her.”

  “Up under the rib cage into the heart,” I said to Zerk. “The nurse knows her anatomy.”

  “I hated to do it,” said Robin. “But I had to. My husband is a very eminent psychiatrist. I couldn’t have these people ruining him.” She looked from me to Zerk to Warren. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  35

  I MET GLORIA FOR lunch at a little Greek restaurant in Newton—halfway between Wellesley and Boston, what we called “neutral territory”—on the Monday before Thanksgiving. We talked about our businesses and our sons and former mutual friends who had, over the years, tended to become either mine or hers, and we carefully avoided mention of the Wellesley house or the reasons why she had wanted me to buy it and then changed her mind.

  Over coffee, she said, “William will be home from college for the holiday, you know.”

  “Sure. I expect we’ll get together, watch some football.”

  “It’s just going to be the three of us for dinner Thursday,” she said.

  I nodded. “That should be nice.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I had expected my friend would be with us. But that’s changed.”

  “Robert,” I said. “The young lawyer.”

  “Richard,” she said quickly.

  I shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “He wanted to have children with me. Can you imagine?”

  “Sure I can. I wanted to have children with you.”

  “That was twenty years ago, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You should be flattered.”

  “His attentions flattered me. He’s only thirty-four. Never married.” She shook her head slowly. “I guess I need a grown-up.”

  I sipped my coffee and smiled. I knew when no comment was
the best comment.

  “Anyway,” she said after a minute, “if you want to join us you’re welcome to. There’ll be plenty of food, and I think your sons would like it.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” I paused to light a cigarette.

  Gloria made a face and waved at the smoke.

  I said, “But I don’t think so.”

  “Plans, huh?”

  “Right.” I nodded. “I’ve got some plans.” I planned to sleep late, get a vat of chili a-bubbling on the stove, and watch the pro game on television while I waited for Terri to arrive. Billy and Joey would drive into town with their girlfriends, and we’d all sit around and eat chili and talk and listen to music and play cards. The boys would leave late, but Terri wouldn’t leave until Sunday, and it would be a day well worth giving thanks for.

  I paid the bill and walked Gloria to her car. I kissed her cheek. “Happy holiday, hon,” I said. And I meant it.

  “You too, Brady,” she said. She seemed to mean it, too.

  Zerk pleaded Robin McAllister not guilty, and they were holding her at Bridgewater State Hospital for ninety days’ observation. He told me that if things worked the way he hoped, the case would never go to trial.

  I talked to Warren on the phone a couple of times. He said he was carrying on his practice and visiting Robin every chance he could. He said the Victorian in Brookline seemed awfully big and empty without her, and depending on how it went with her, he might sell it and buy a condo and rent an office. He just didn’t know what to do and wasn’t quite ready to think about it yet.

  We didn’t talk fishing. The trout season was a long way off. Lots of things could change between November and April.

  The New Hampshire medical examiner found VerSed in Mary Ellen’s body. His counterpart in Massachusetts made the same discovery in Dave Finn.

  Susan finally got to say good-bye to Mary Ellen. She buried her daughter in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord the week after Thanksgiving. It was a sharp, clear, bitterly cold morning, and Susan was in a wheelchair bundled under a blanket. Her hair looked thin and lifeless, and the flesh had melted away so that her skin stretched taut over her fine bones and her eyes seemed too big for her face. Terri and I pushed the wheelchair. A great many Concordians were present, mostly friends and admirers of Susan. I doubted if many of them had known Mary Ellen.

  Susan died in late February. The First Parish Church in Concord was packed for her service. She’d had many friends, and I was honored to count myself among them.

  I sat with Terri in a pew near the back. She cried a little. I put my arm around her and she pushed her face against my shoulder. And she rode with me in the long slow line of cars to Sleepy Hollow, where they buried Susan between Mary Ellen and Charles.

  Afterward Terri and I went to the Ames house on Monument Street. We had coffee and tried to discuss all the business the two of us had to finish up for Susan.

  She cried again when she told me that the snowdrops Susan had planted in September had just started to poke their pale green snouts through the mulch in the sunniest parts of the gardens out back. If Susan had lived just a few days longer she might have been able to see them. Terri thought this was infinitely sad. I thought so, too.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries

  PROLOGUE

  HE SHOULD’VE TAKEN A taxi.

  That was his first thought after he completed his descent and began to shoulder through the bodies toward the front of the platform.

  He held his briefcase flat against his crotch, like a shield. Women aren’t the only ones who have to watch out for subway gropers. He’d learned that from personal experience.

  As he wedged his way forward, the bodies closed in around him. Old, young, black, white, male, female. Not people. Just bodies. And as the bodies closed in, so did their heat. And their odors, all mingled, the stench of a hundred human bodies, smells of sex and anxiety and fear, farts and urine and sweat and booze and garlic all mixed in a disgusting stew of human stink.

  He tried breathing through his mouth. The odors became tastes. He was afraid he might gag.

  He tugged at the knot in his necktie, felt dribbles of sweat begin to trickle down his sides, dampen the insides of his thighs, soak the back of his shirt under his linen jacket.

  He pulled the briefcase tighter against him, grateful for the thin but comforting barrier.

  The crush of bodies around him forced him up against a man who stood solid and unmovable in front of him. He was a head taller, this man, with a brown neck as thick as a telephone pole and a shaved brown scalp that glistened in the piss-colored light. Another body nudged him from behind, then settled against him. More bodies, bodies on both sides, bodies everywhere. They pressed his arms against his sides, holding him immobile with the heavy briefcase tight against his middle.

  It was oddly silent there beneath the street. Some muffled human sounds. Breathing, grunting. No distinguishable voices. Distant mechanical sounds. Somewhere on the platform a radio. Rock music and static.

  Why in hell hadn’t he taken a taxi?

  He felt the vibrations through the soles of his feet. As the tremoring grew, the crowd seemed to shake itself like a dog in a dream, muttering, twitching its separate parts to separate rhythms as it came awake, and then he heard the rumble, and it became a roar, and with it the metal-on-metal screech as the train approached the platform.

  Thank God.

  The bodies pressed tighter against him, forcing his face up against the damp shirt of the enormous man in front of him.

  A hand snaked around from behind him, then an arm half encircled him. A forearm against his chest forced the top half of his body backward. And an odd pinprick low on his back, and then—

  Oh, Jesus! A shaft of pain, sudden, searing, unbearable. He threw back his head, he opened his mouth, he knew he screamed. He heard nothing but the metallic squeal of brakes and the hiss and rumble of the engine. He screamed again and again as a red-hot arrow of indescribable pain burned toward his heart and bodies surged around him and the train roared and screeched.

  That arm around his chest held him impaled on his pain. His knees buckled. His legs were suddenly cold, numb. He became detached from his body. He felt himself float above the crowd and drift there, separate now from the mob, looking down at them, looking down at himself and his pain.

  But he saw only fog.

  He had the urge to laugh. He instantly forgot why.

  A gentle voice in his ear said, “Thank you. I’ll take that.” The briefcase. It was gone. His shield. Now his groin—

  Another pain, quick and hard, rammed into the core of his soul, and with that ramrod of pain came the understanding of what that kind of pain meant.

  The sudden urge to vomit. No strength for it. And then he felt himself spinning, spiraling.

  The bottom half of his body began to melt. A snowman on a hot sidewalk. So that’s how it felt to be dying.

  To be dying.

  Christ. Oh good Jesus Christ forever and ever world without end amen.

  The book. The damn book.

  It’s true.

  If he could just remain upright he wouldn’t die. Nobody died standing up. That’s true, isn’t it? He tried to lift his hands, to grab the shoulder of the big man in front of him, something to hang on to, to keep him upright, to keep him alive. But his fingers were numb and his arms refused to move. He felt himself tilt sideways, settle momentarily against the man’s broad, wet back, slip, slide, collapse.

  Where are you, honey? Sweetheart? Are you there?

  They were stepping around him, avoiding him. From somewhere far away he heard a woman’s voice. “See? The bums are wearing neckties these days. Banker, lawyer, ha? High roller from Wall Street, ha? See? That’s what’s happening to them.”

  His mind formed the words “Help me.” He thought he spoke those words. He couldn’t hear his own voice. Couldn’t hear anything. Just a hum, growing fainter.

  Should’ve taken
a taxi….

  1

  IT WAS THE SUMMER’S first heat wave, and I was putting my pinstripe away for the weekend when Charlie McDevitt called.

  “Coyne,” I said. I wedged the phone against my shoulder and sat on the edge of my bed to tug at my pantlegs.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Friend of mine needs a lawyer.”

  “I litigate, therefore I am,” I said. “My motto.”

  “Ha,” he said. “I know you. You take on new clients the way Red Auerbach signs rejects off the waiver wire.”

  “Rarely,” I said. “You’re right.”

  “Anyway, this one’s criminal, not civil. But he needs you.”

  “Tell me.” I dropped my pants in a heap on the floor. I lay back on my bed and lit a cigarette.

  Charlie cleared his throat. “Guy name of Daniel McCloud got picked up this afternoon in Wilson Falls, charged with possession, possession with intent, and trafficking.”

  “Where in hell is Wilson Falls?”

  “Little nothing town out in the Connecticut Valley. More or less across the river from Northampton.”

  “They holding him?”

  “Yes. Arraignment won’t be till Monday.”

  “Was he?”

  “What, trafficking?”

  “Yes. Was he trafficking?”

  “He grew marijuana in his backyard. The cops came with a warrant, ripped up his garden, filled several trash bags. Not to mention all the incriminating odds and ends they found in the house.”

  “Trafficking includes cultivation,” I said. “Fifty pounds means trafficking. That’s a felony worth two-and-a-half to fifteen. Must’ve been a major-league garden. What about priors?”

  “One year suspended in ’79 for possession. He also admitted to sufficient facts in ’76. That’s supposed to be sealed, of course, but…”

  “But,” I said, “the court sees it on his record anyway. Which makes this his third time up.” I paused to stub out my cigarette, then said, “Sorry, pal. No deal. Friend or no friend, I’m not defending some drug dealer. I don’t need that kind of business.”