Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  Charlie shrugged. “Believe whatever’s comfortable for you.”

  After a moment of silence I said, “What’s going to happen to Vern?”

  “Dunno. Maybe nothing. Hard to prove the connection. Vern’s well placed. Lots of money.”

  I nodded and let it go at that.

  Charlie lifted his hand about an inch off the table, and our waitress appeared almost instantly at our table.

  “You gonna have the lobster, too?” he said to me.

  “And pass up the finnan haddie? Not a chance.”

  I lit a cigarette after the waitress left. “There are a couple things I still don’t understand. For example, how did Bud Turner know that those marshals, who both called themselves Rolando—how did he know what they were?”

  “Uncle Fish,” said Charlie. “Uncle Fish Collucci told him. How did he know? Listen. There’s a girl runs a Xerox machine in a government office in Washington. Nice kid. Husband, two little boys. When she was younger, she made a mistake. She listened to a guy who told her he was gonna make her a movie star. So this girl was in a movie.”

  “Stag film,” I said.

  Charlie nodded. “You can probably figure out the rest.”

  “Collucci got ahold of the film, let the girl know that he might be able to use some of the junk from the office wastebaskets. Probably even paid her for it. Little carrot, little stick.”

  “You got it,” said Charlie. “Collucci learned a lot that way.”

  “The big question,” I said. “What did Collucci have on Vern Wheeler that he would go along with all this?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. But you can bet the Bureau will find out. They love that kind of shit. It’s what they’re best at, figuring out stuff like that. Paperwork. Computers. Backtracking. All that complicated, tedious stuff. Going over old tax records, contracts, deeds, bank records, anything they can lay their hands on, cross-checking here, refiguring sums there. Those guys can do that, day after day, week after week, happy as pigs in mud. They haven’t found it yet. But they will. Because you can bet your rosy red fanny that it’s there.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe it. A man like Vern Wheeler.”

  Charlie sipped thoughtfully at his beer. “Go figure it,” he said, gazing out the window at the boats moored alongside. “Maybe Wheeler needed some quick up-front money one time. Maybe there was a contract he was bidding on. Somebody whispered a sum into his ear, or one of his competitors mysteriously dropped out. Not that Wheeler necessarily asked for help, understand. Guy like Collucci, he does people favors. He’s in a position to do that. He’s got people close to other people. Legislators, aides, trustees, boards of directors. Uncle Fish comes up with these delicious tidbits of information, he looks around, tries to figure who might enjoy them, profit from them. Then he shares them. Later on—hell, maybe years later—Uncle Fish shows up on the doorstep. ‘Hey, remember me? I’m your uncle, did you a favor, right? Now it’s my turn. Time to pay the piper. You get nothing for nothing in this world. Understand you’ve got a nice quiet spot up there in the wilds of Maine. Nice state, Maine. Not that far from Canada, your place. Place where a man could lay low for a while, do a little angling if he were of a mind to. I’ve even got a fella for you who can fly an airplane, and a real good chef.’ Like that. What could Wheeler say?”

  “No,” I said. “He could say no.”

  “Practically impossible.”

  I shook my head. “You’ve got to say no.”

  “You just don’t say no to Uncle Fish Collucci,” said Charlie. “If you do, you find nasty stories about yourself in the Globe or the Washington Post, all documented, that are guaranteed to get you hauled in front of a grand jury, with all the attending headlines. Or, if Uncle Fish thinks that tactic might not be effective, the next man who shows up on your doorstep is someone like Ceci Malagudi, with a little .22 automatic tucked in his belt with a long thing screwed on to the end of it so that when he shoots holes into your head with it, it sounds like somebody snapping an elastic band.”

  I sat back and downed the dregs of my old-fashioned. “A real disappointment,” I said.

  “What, Wheeler? Don’t be too harsh on him, Brady. He got sucked in. By little tiny increments. Takes quite a man to see that coming and resist it.”

  “I used to think Vern Wheeler was quite a man.”

  Charlie shrugged. “There aren’t that many left.”

  Epilogue

  SEELYE SMITH AND I had lunch at a no-nonsense little restaurant right on the edge of the Portland waterfront. We both had fresh-caught lobsters, which we selected from a big glass tank against the back wall. Smith put up only token resistance when I insisted on paying.

  After lunch, I shook his mangled hand and climbed into my BMW. It was a muggy August day, and the road from Portland to Greenville was still and dusty as I drove through the sandy scrub oak and pitch pine countryside.

  The new pilot was named William. He wore a starched white short-sleeved shirt and pressed chino pants. His hair was cut military short. His plane was spanking new. The cockpit was equipped with all sorts of electronic gadgetry. William called me sir, even after I told him my name was Brady. He offered to point out the sights, but I told him I knew them already. So we cruised through the silent skies without talking. He seemed very competent.

  When we taxied up to the dock, Tiny and Marge were standing there waiting. Tiny had his arm slung casually around Marge’s shoulder. She rested her hip familiarly against his.

  Marge gave me a quick hug. I shook hands with Tiny. We went up to the lodge and arranged ourselves in rockers. It seemed like years, rather than scarcely a month, since I’d been there.

  Polly, they told me, had gone to spend some time with a friend and her family in a small town outside of Bar Harbor. They had horses and some chickens. She would be back to Raven Lake for a week at the end of the month before she started classes.

  William, the new pilot, was working out well. Very careful, very conscientious. Polite with the guests.

  They had found a young married couple to do the cooking. Of course, they weren’t as good as Bud Turner.

  Woody had returned to Raven Lake. Tiny said that he and Lew Pike played cribbage together every night in the lodge. The sports liked to gather around to listen to them argue. When I saw Woody just before dinner, he strode up to me and shook my hand. Wanted to take me fishing. Said he had a new place he was saving for me. He never mentioned his arrest or the way he had looked at me when Thurl Harris took him away. I didn’t mention it, either.

  The fishing had slowed down. You could take bass in the evening and early morning off the shoals on the west shore. If you wanted to troll with wire line, you could still pick up a togue or a salmon. But it was slow. Things were due to pick up when the cooler weather arrived.

  That night before bed I wandered down to the dock. I had been there a few minutes, savoring the vast silence and waiting for the loons, when Marge arrived. She had drinks for us.

  I patted the dock beside where I sat, and she eased herself down. I lit cigarettes for us and handed one to her.

  “Thanks,” she said softly. “Haven’t had one of these since you were here.”

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Good. Real good, Brady.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Tiny and I are doing good now. Thanks to you.”

  “No thanks to me.”

  In the moonlight I saw her smile. “Whether you know it or not, yes, thanks to you. It’s like—like the place has been purged. And our relationship has been, too.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “Of course, Tiny’s real upset about Vern.”

  “I am, too.”

  Marge sipped her drink and took a long, pensive drag on her cigarette. “Can you stay long?”

  “I’ll be heading back tomorrow. I only wanted to pick up my gear. And say hello. Or good-bye, maybe. I never did say good-bye.”

  She leaned against me
and kissed my cheek softly. “Hello, Brady Coyne. And good-bye.”

  We sat together for a long time, not saying much. After a while we got up and strolled back to the lodge. We didn’t hear the loons that evening, but it was all right. I knew they were out there.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries

  One

  WHEN TOM BARON CALLED me, he did not beat around the bush. This was unusual, since he had earned a reputation for excellence in misdirection and evasion during his current gubernatorial campaign.

  “I gotta see you, Brady,” he said.

  “Is this something political, Tom?”

  “It’s not political. It’s personal. It’s something for my lawyer.”

  “Because if this is political, I already told you. I want nothing to do with your campaign. I’m not even going to vote for you.”

  “I told you. It’s personal.”

  I lit a cigarette and swiveled around to look out my office window at the rooftops of Copley Square. The sky over Boston was clear and blue. Indian summer. The frost would soon be on the pumpkin. Next thing, it would be nipping at my nose. Or was it toes? Whatever, an attorney with well-ordered priorities should be casting dry flies to rising brown trout someplace like the Deerfield River on a day like this.

  I rotated my chair again in an effort to put the temptations of the great out-of-doors behind me. A futile try.

  “You there, Brady?” said Tom.

  I sighed. “Yeah, Tom. I’m here. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “Why the hell not? My lines are secure, believe me. Your opponent got something on you, is that it? You want to bring suit against the Democratic party? Looking for the Globe to make a retraction? Hey, I loved that cartoon on the editorial page this morning. See it? They had you dressed in an animal skin. You looked a lot like Fred Flintstone, actually, and you were swinging around this big club at a bunch of dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were labeled ‘Big Government’ and ‘Drug Kingpins’ and ‘Welfare Moochers.’ It was beautiful.”

  “I didn’t find it that funny,” said Tom primly. “But that’s not it. I told you it wasn’t political.”

  “They’re doing a real number on you, pal.”

  “Screw them. Hey, I really gotta see you. You still my attorney, or what?”

  “Sure. I’m your attorney.”

  “You still handle my personal stuff, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you make house calls.”

  “I do. That is part of my charm.”

  “That’s your main charm,” he said. “Look. We’re having one of our frank-and-bean fundraisers this evening in the old hometown. Why don’t you come to it, and we can get together afterwards?”

  “You want me to pay twenty bucks for a plate of beans?”

  “For you, Counselor, it’s on the house. I’ll throw in a speech for good measure.”

  “You do that, I won’t know which gave me gas.”

  “You’ll be there, then.”

  “I’m a lawyer. It’s a tough job. But I’m a tough guy.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Look, Tom. What the hell is this all about, anyway?”

  “Can’t tell you. See you tonight. Elks lodge in Windsor Harbor. Be there around six-thirty.”

  Windsor Harbor, Massachusetts, Tom Baron’s hometown, was about an hour’s drive from my office in downtown Boston. I persuaded Sylvie Szabo to go with me. I thought she would find Tom Baron’s frank-and-bean dinner in the local Elks hall entertaining.

  “Tom Baron,” I told her as we drove, “is trying to combat the Republican fat-cat image. He wants people to think he’s down-to-earth, old-fashioned, approachable, plain folks.”

  “But Tom Baron is a fat-cat Republican,” observed Sylvie.

  “True enough. But that isn’t important. What’s important is the image.”

  “American politics is amusing,” said Sylvie.

  “Well, I think you might find this evening amusing, anyway.”

  “Should I vote for this Tom Baron?”

  “If you believe in the great American Dream, you probably should. If you believe that any poor boy can make good, and that the only enemy of progress is big government and individual sloth, yes, Tom Baron is your man.”

  Tom Baron, I went on to tell Sylvie, grew up in little Windsor Harbor on the Massachusetts North Shore in the days before it had been condoed and yuppified. Tom’s father had scratched a meager living out of a nine-hole golf course along the rocky seacoast. Tom had earned a degree in agronomy from UMass, paying for his tuition by mowing his father’s fairways and selling golf balls in the pro shop. When he graduated, he married his high school sweetheart and took over the club. He persuaded his worn-out parents to retire to Florida and within three years Tom turned developer. He carved up the hundred or so acres of fairway and rough into house lots, built expensive homes on them, and made his first few million. It was rumored that Tom had smoothed over any uneven spots by spreading around incentives among key members of the Windsor Harbor planning board, board of selectmen, and zoning board. This was never proven, although several of those officials ended up living in Tom’s development, having received favorable mortgage rates from the banks where Tom did his business.

  “This,” Sylvie interrupted, “is the American way, no?”

  “It is, yes.”

  “So your Mr. Baron is a crook, then?”

  “Being a crook is not necessarily the American way, Sylvie.”

  “I am hopelessly confused,” said Sylvie, pretending to pout.

  I exited Route 128 onto 1A and stopped at a red light. I leaned over and kissed the top of Sylvie’s head. “You are the least confused person I know,” I said into her hair. “But you do seem to have a lopsided way of looking at politics.”

  “I lived in Hungary for fourteen years,” she said softly, her head bowed while I nuzzled the nape of her neck. “I see American politics differently from you. In America, the politicians care what the people think. That is not a bad thing.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure it’s a good thing,” I murmured. The light changed and I put my BMW through its gears. We were into the countryside now, winding through apple orchards and pastures and woodlands painted crimson and gold. We crossed several little tidal creeks. The smell of salt air wafted in through the sunroof.

  This was Baron country. After he’d made his fortune out of his father’s golf course, Tom had taken up buying and selling North Shore properties in a big way. I handled most of his contracts, cleared the deeds, researched the laws, and in general kept him on the proper side of the fine line.

  What he managed to accomplish over martinis was his own business. At least, that’s the way I rationalized it. He was a tough, hardheaded businessman. He broke no laws. If he had, I would have defended him. And then I would have cut him loose, because if he broke a law it would have meant he had failed to follow my advice. But he never did. He was a good client. He also happened to pay me a lot of money.

  He was also a pretty good guy and, as often seems to happen between me and my clients, we had become friends. When I was still married to Gloria, we’d take our sons, Billy and Joey, for Sunday afternoon picnics with Tom and Joanie and their boy, Buddy. Tom had a boat, and we’d cruise out to the Isle of Shoals or up into the mouth of the Merrimack. Sometimes we’d find the bluefish running, or maybe a school of mackerel, and the boys would haul them in.

  Tom was also a helluva golfer, a talent he claimed was useful in his business activities. He gave me two strokes a side, and he usually beat me anyway.

  After Gloria and I split, I steered clear of social get-togethers with Tom’s family. Joanie kept inviting me for dinner, and I kept finding excuses. I knew that Joanie and Gloria kept in touch, and I sensed that we would be awkward. There had always been a vague chemistry between Joanie and me, harmless enough when we were both married, but nothing I wanted to let loose after my divorc
e.

  When Tom decided to heed the blandishments of the Republican party to run for governor, he asked me to serve on what he called his “brain trust.” I declined instantly. A man had to draw the line somewhere.

  “Politics,” I told Tom gently when he asked me, “just isn’t my thing.”

  A more accurate truth was that Tom Baron’s politics in particular wasn’t my thing.

  His “just plain folks” campaign was the butt of jokes in what he referred to as the “liberal press,” which included both Boston newspapers. The small-town weeklies were generally kinder to him. The campaign was the brainchild of his campaign manager, Eddy Curry, who claimed to be a student of the American political scene. “It’s the old log cabin and hard cider theme,” he told me once. “Abe Lincoln splitting logs. JFK playing touch football with Bobby and Teddy, or at the helm of old Joe’s schooner, squinting saltily into the sun. Ike in hip boots trying to catch a trout. Right? We’ve gotta personalize our man, see. I mean, Tom is a wealthy fella. But we’ve gotta package him as a regular guy. One of the boys. Republicans like to hold their fundraisers at the Ritz or the Parker House, right? Five hundred, a thousand bucks a plate. Lobster, shad roe, shit like that. Black tie, right? Okay. So we tip it over. The Ritz? We line up the local Sons of Italy hall. K of C. Rotary. Elks. Go to the small towns. Let the press take its best shot. Most of the people don’t trust the press anyway. Lobster? Prime rib? We serve baked beans and franks and brown bread. Mother’s apple pie for dessert. And we wheel out old Tom, he tells a few jokes, lets the folks see that he ain’t any bigger than life, knock off a few homespun truths, two or three eternal verities. He’s glib enough. Handsome fella to boot. He’ll go over good. After the speech, we clear away the tables and bring out the jug band. Let Tom do a couple riffs on the bass fiddle. Tap a keg. Turkey in the straw. Hee-haw. Beat the Democrats at their own game. We’ll sell this sucker. Folks don’t wanna know that the twentieth goddamn century has arrived, never mind it’s practically over. They wanna think that if they work hard they’ll earn something for it, roughly what it’s worth, and when they earn it the government ain’t gonna take it away from them and then turn it over to shiftless minority types who’ll use it to buy the house next door and screw up their property values. The demographics are with us on this. The liberals have had their day in the old Bay State. Now it’s Tom Baron’s turn.”