He suggested I perform a maneuver that sounded uncomfortable. Then he hung up.
Still no call from Concannon. I waited at my office well past my normal closing time, growing itchier by the minute. Julie poked her head in at five-thirty. “I’m out of here,” she announced.
“I think I’ll hang around for a while,” I said. “Lots of heavy legal matters to attend to.”
“Ho, ho.”
“Don’t bother with the answering machine,” I called after her. “I’ll turn it on when I go.”
I took the ceremonial bottle of Jack Daniel’s from its hiding place in the file cabinet and poured myself three fingers. Three adult male fingers. I lit a cigarette and swiveled around to study the night lights of my city. Many people find elevated views of cities at night beautiful. I’m a moon and stars man, myself. You can’t see moon and stars very well from the city. You can see them very well from the wilderness, though, and if God’s natural lights are doubled by their reflection in a placid Maine lake, so much the better. And the hoot of an owl, the wail of a loon, or the pinkletink of a spring peeper will elevate my soul infinitely quicker and higher than the honks and curses of congested city traffic.
I’ve come to recognize that I’m an anachronism, a country boy doing the work of a city lawyer.
I’m an anachronism in several other ways, too. Becca Katz and Gloria Coyne could attest to that.
I stubbed out the cigarette half smoked, drained the glass, and grabbed my coat. I had to do something.
I took only one wrong turn before I found the Hayden place in Harvard. I pulled in behind Brenda Hayden’s Volvo and sat there for a minute, regretting my impulsiveness. It was downright rude to drop in without at least phoning first.
On the other hand, my intentions were pure.
Warm orange light seeped from the back windows of the farmhouse into trapezoid-shaped puddles on the snow-covered lawn. Frozen slush crackled under my feet as I mounted the back steps onto the open porch. I rapped on the door and waited, blowing open-mouthed into my hands and rubbing them together. Overhead the sky was an inverted black bowl studded with a million beautiful points of light. My breath came in foggy puffs. Radiational cooling, the meteorologists called it. It was a cold night, and it would get colder.
I waited three or four minutes before the door opened. Brenda Hayden stood there frowning. She was wearing baggy bibbed overalls over a flannel shirt. She was taller than I remembered.
“Brady Coyne,” I said loudly through the storm door. “Remember?”
She nodded vigorously and opened the door.
“Hi,” she said. “A surprise. Come on in. Crawl up to the woodstove. It’s beastly out there.”
I entered, stomped my feet on the mat inside the door, and shook my jacket off. She took it from me and draped it over the back of a chair.
“Have a seat. Let me clear off the table.”
She removed the dirty dishes from the kitchen table and stacked them beside the sink. “Nice to see you again,” she said casually, as if I visited her regularly. “How’ve you been?”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry to drop in like this—”
“But you just happened to be in the neighborhood.” She laughed. “Hey. Nobody just happens to be in this neighborhood. Look, want some coffee or something? A drink?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Coffee, then. It’s all fresh and hot.”
She turned to the coffeepot, grateful, it seemed to me, to have something to occupy her. Her movements were quick and nervous, which seemed natural enough given the suddenness of my appearance.
She slid a mug of coffee in front of me. “Black, right?”
“I’m flattered you remembered.”
She shrugged and sat across from me. She flicked a hank of hair away from her forehead with her forefinger. She stared into her mug for a minute, and then, without looking up, she said, “No, to answer your question, I have neither seen nor heard from Derek. I reported him missing the same day you suggested I should. It’s become—I’m not handling it as well as I thought I would.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any news, either,” I said. “Except I located the Audi, and you can pick it up if you want.”
“Where is it?”
“In the Alewife parking garage.”
She nodded and sipped her coffee. “I suppose I’ll fetch it sometime. I keep thinking I should leave it there for when Derek comes back. Anyway, I’ve got my brother’s Volvo, so there’s no big rush. I bet the parking fee will be astronomical.”
“That’s not your car out there?”
“No. My brother Andy’s planning to sell it. Meanwhile he’s letting me use it. I suppose if I ask him he’ll drive in with me to get the Audi.” She hugged herself and frowned at me. “Mr. Coyne—”
“Brady.”
“Brady. Why did you come here?”
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“If you have to smoke, that means you have bad news for me, right?”
I lit a Winston. “I told you. I don’t have news of any kind. But I have some suspicions, and I figured no one else would be telling you what’s going on. It occurred to me that you have a right to know.”
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Where are your children?”
She rolled her eyes and smiled. “With my mother. It’s just been too weird around here. I’ve been too weird, is what I mean. Mother lives in Ayer. That’s just the next town over. Where Andy lives. Good old Mom drives the girls to school. She’s been oh, so very understanding. She assumes Derek has run off with some busty young thing. She wants to tell me that she knew it would happen all the time, but she hasn’t quite screwed up her courage yet. So she just looks at me mournfully and says consoling things. Which only serve to upset me.” She arched her eyebrows at me. “Is that it? Is that what you came to tell me?”
“That he’s run off with some busty young thing?” I shook my head. “No. That’s what I originally thought. But now…” I let my voice trail off, reluctant to say it.
She leaned across the table to me. “Now you think he’s dead, don’t you.”
I nodded.
She stared at me for a moment. Then abruptly she stood up. She went to the sink and began to rinse off the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher, keeping her back to me. I remained sitting at the table, watching her. When she was finished, she poured some detergent into the machine, slammed it shut, poked a button, and it began to hum. Then she turned to face me. I somehow expected that she’d been weeping. But her eyes were dry and her face composed.
“Okay,” she said, a harsh edge to her voice. “Why don’t you tell me who you really are and why you’re really here.”
I lifted my palms and let them fall. “I’m Brady Coyne, I’m a lawyer, and I’m here because I’m involved in an investigation that, in part, includes trying to find your husband.”
She wiped her hands on the seat of her overalls and came back to the table. She sat across from me, laced her fingers together in front of her, and said, “After you left here the last time, I got to thinking. This tall man with gray eyes, who says he’s a lawyer but dresses like a lumberjack, he comes and starts pumping me for information about Derek, and, like a dummy, I cry and spill out my guts, and after he leaves I suddenly realize I don’t even know why he came here, unless it was to get me to spill out my guts. He tells me nothing except for some double-talk about me presumably hiring some private investigator. Then I said, what the hell, he’s a lawyer and that’s how lawyers do it, and he seemed nice enough, so I sort of forgot about it. Then he shows up again. Now I want to know. What the hell do you want out of me?”
I tried to smile ingratiatingly. It felt stiff. “For one thing, I wanted to tell you about the Audi.”
She nodded skeptically. “You could have called.”
“And I wanted to know if you’d heard from your husband.”
“And I want to know why you care.”
/> I nodded. “Okay. Fair enough. When I was here the first time, I thought your husband ran over a friend of mine and killed him. This friend had taken photos of him. I figured the photos were incriminating in some way, and that’s why Les was killed. My friend was a private investigator. I thought you hired him. I thought—”
“You thought Derek was having an affair. I remember that. So what’s different now?”
“I’ve learned some more things. Now I don’t think it happened that way. Now I think your husband’s partner, Arthur Concannon, may have killed my friend.”
Brenda Hayden smiled crookedly. “And Derek, too. Is that it?”
I nodded. “That’s how it looks.”
“So you came here to—what?—to prepare me for the possibility that my husband is dead?”
“Partly. But mostly to see if there was anything you could remember he might’ve said about Concannon—business deals, financial transactions he might’ve been worried about, something personal, maybe, something about the man he was afraid of. Or maybe a hint of mistrust.” I shrugged. “Anything you could think of.”
She stared at me for an instant before she allowed her eyes to shift away from my face. She studied something beyond my right shoulder for a long time before she spoke. “Arthur Concannon,” she said carefully, spacing out her words, “is my friend. Our friend. He and Derek are partners and friends. They are not in competition with each other. They are not enemies. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s a pretty speech, Brenda,” I said. “Just the right mixture of indignation and sincerity. But it took you too long to polish it. Tell me the truth.”
She snorted, a quick, harsh laugh. “And just who the hell do you think you are, barging into my house with accusations and suppositions and horrible ideas, telling me my husband has been murdered by his best friend and business partner? All this talk. I don’t know what any of it means. Goddamn it, anyway. Goddamn you.”
She pounded on the table with both of her clenched fists. Then the tears came, although the fury on her face did not diminish. She wiped her cheeks with quick, angry swipes of her wrists. “Oh, it pisses me off when a man makes me cry,” she said. “I see you sitting there, saying to yourself how you’re so tough, you can make a weak female person bawl. Listen, Mr. Lawyer. I am angry and I am frustrated and that’s why I’m crying, so don’t you try to take any credit for it.”
“Look, Brenda—”
“No. You look. Look for your jacket and look for the door and look for your God damn car and get the hell out of my house.”
I shrugged. I slipped into my jacket. I opened the back door, paused, and said, “Thanks for the coffee, anyway.”
I closed the door behind me quickly, before I could hear her retort.
I sat in my BMW for several minutes before I started it up, trying to sort out the impressions and random messages that were pecking at the outer fringes of what passed for my mind.
Brenda Hayden’s performance had been good but flawed. I didn’t know her well enough to be certain, but she struck me as a little off-center. Eccentric. Her reactions seemed too studied, her emotions too calculatedly hysterical.
On the other hand, she had been missing her husband for three weeks. I told her I thought he was dead. How else should she react?
I turned the key in the ignition and flicked on the headlights of my car. Before I backed out of the Hayden driveway, I jotted down the license number of Brenda Hayden’s brother’s Volvo.
What I especially wondered about, as I drove the unlit country roads of Harvard, Massachusetts, was this: Why had there been two sets of dirty dishes on Brenda Hayden’s kitchen table when I arrived? Would a woman be likely to brew a full pot of coffee for her own after-supper consumption?
And what was the significance of the five pieces of unmatched luggage I had seen lined up in the hallway that led into her living room?
16
WHEN MY CLOCK RADIO clicked on at four o’clock, I was already wide-eyed and waiting for it. The morning man announced the weather with more good cheer than seemed warranted—clear and cold in the morning, clouding over, with snow beginning in the afternoon. Accumulations of six to twelve inches in the Greater Boston area. Double that west of Route 495. Blowing and drifting.
The temperature in Kenmore Square was seven degrees. The sun would rise at six thirty-three.
I wanted to be there at least a half hour before that.
Before bed the night before I had laid out what I’d be needing—my faithful old red flannel long johns, wool pants, two pairs of wool socks, Herman Survivor boots, a heavy wool turtleneck sweater, ski mittens, and my insulated camouflage duck-hunting jumpsuit.
I tugged on the long johns and went into the kitchen. I filled my steel Stanley thermos with scalding water from the tap to heat it up while the coffee brewed. My Smith and Wesson .38 was loaded and waiting on the table. Sharon Bell would be gratified. There was also a box of cartridges and my 10X German binoculars.
I gobbled down two stale doughnuts and a big chunk of extra-sharp Vermont cheddar. A breakfast to stick to the ribs. Then I dumped the hot water out of the thermos and filled it with coffee. As an afterthought I added a hefty shot of bourbon. Then I finished dressing.
I tucked an unopened pack of Winstons into one pocket, the revolver and spare cartridges into another, slung the binoculars around my neck, and waddled out to the elevator. I hoped none of my neighbors would see me.
Less than an hour later I turned into a little side road about a mile from the Hayden farm in Harvard. I left my BMW parked against the plowed snowbank. I hoped it wouldn’t attract attention for the few hours I expected to be gone.
The woods that extended from the little roadway to the edge of the Hayden property were thickly overgrown and hilly, and in places the powdery snow, sheltered from the melting rays of the sun, came to my knees, so that even in the frigid predawn air I sweated copiously under my heavy clothing. I blessed my wool underwear, which possessed the miraculous quality of insulating and warming even when wet.
The setup was as I pictured it, based on my one daylight visit to Brenda Hayden. The thick woods ended abruptly halfway down a hillside, which stretched the rest of the way as an open field for about a hundred yards to the farmhouse. I could see the back door of the house, the barn, and the Volvo parked in the driveway. The far side of the house and barn were sheltered by a dense clump of spruces. In the distance, Mount Wachusett humped into the horizon, a gray-purple lump in the thin yellow light.
I hunkered down among a clump of pin oaks that still held most of their sere leaves, adjusting my back against the trunk of a larger oak so I had a clear view of the Hayden farmyard. I focused the binoculars so I could clearly read the license plate of the Volvo.
When I had arrived home the previous night after my visit with Brenda Hayden, I dug out the computer list of license numbers Charlie McDevitt had procured for me. The numbers I had copied down from the Volvo matched the registration of someone named Andrew Bayles, who lived at 129 Center Street in Ayer. Andy, brother of Brenda.
I wondered if Brenda herself had been driving the night Les Katz snapped the photos of Derek, the night Les had been run down and killed. Or if, for some reason, Arthur Concannon had been driving the Volvo.
I wondered who had eaten supper with Brenda before I got there. I wondered where she was planning to go, and for how long, with her five suitcases.
I felt edgy, the way I felt before a courtroom appearance, the same way I used to feel before a big ball game. I patted the Smith and Wesson, which hung heavily but comfortingly in my pocket. I’d objected to lugging the weapon on a well-thought-out abstract principle. I decided to carry it for a very practical reason.
I didn’t know what I expected to observe from my hillside blind. But whatever it was, I knew I wanted to see it. So I crouched on the edge of the woods and watched the sky brighten as the sun rose somewhere behind me. Spread before me was a scene Andrew Wyeth m
ight have painted—a sleepy farmyard, a row of gaunt, leafless sugar maples, fields and meadows bumping away toward distant hills, woodlots bordered by stone walls, brushstrokes of burnt umber and ochre washed in the sharply angled yellow-orange light of the newly risen sun. A lone crow cruised and flapped overhead. Somewhere a dog barked once. The sky evolved imperceptibly from gray to cold, pale blue. Another bright winter’s day.
I poured a mug of coffee from the thermos and held it awkwardly in my mittened paw. The coffee scalded my tongue when I sipped it. The afterburn of the bourbon lit a small, welcome ember in my stomach.
The silver Mercedes pulled in behind the Volvo a few minutes after seven. I shifted my position to gain a better view and discovered my left arm aching and my neck stiff. The doctor had told me the disc damage in my neck was permanent. I still didn’t want to believe him.
A man in a navy blue topcoat and felt hat stepped out of the Mercedes. I trained my binoculars on him. It was Arthur Concannon, which didn’t surprise me. It was one of the scenarios I had played with after I began to suspect that Brenda Hayden was entertaining company. The oldest motive for murder in the world was lust for a friend’s wife.
Concannon chunked the car door shut, paused to blow into his cupped hands, and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and bent to help a woman slide out. Through the binoculars I could see that she wore spike heels and a calf-length green dress under her fur coat. She had a spectacular tumble of long blond hair—very much in the style of Farrah Fawcett.
This was the mystery woman, the one who had told Les Katz she was Derek Hayden’s wife when she hired him to spy on Hayden.
She turned to reach into the car for something, and in that instant I saw her face. Melanie Walther, in a wig.
She retrieved her purse and, holding on to Concannon’s arm, went to the back door of the Hayden farmhouse. After a minute the door opened and Concannon and Melanie Walther went inside.
I adjusted my back against the oak tree and tried to make sense out of what I had just observed. Okay, so Concannon was a friend of the Haydens and was disposed to comfort Brenda in her time of confusion over the disappearance of her husband. Nothing wrong with that. Perhaps their friendship had evolved into a relationship more intimate. Natural enough. No crime in that, either.
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