“So Romano was using a fake name,” I said. “You knew that when you talked to me this morning, I’ll bet.”
He smiled and shrugged.
“You’re even more devious than I gave you credit for.”
“We ran those Jersey plates on the Oldsmobile,” said Lipton. “Turns out to be a rental. Came from Budget, at the Newark airport. Name on the paperwork they had was Owen Ransom, from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We talked to the police in Carlisle. They confirm our identification.”
“So,” I said, “you want me to tell you why some hardware clerk in Pennsylvania would rent a car in New Jersey, drive to Cortland, Massachusetts, pose as a doctor, pretend to want to buy a small-town pediatric medical practice, and end up with his throat cut in a motel parking lot.”
“Well,” said Lipton, “yes. Do you know?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You encountered Mr. Ransom a couple of times yesterday,” said Vanderweigh. “Can you remember anything he said, any offhand comment he might have made—”
“We’ve already been over this,” I said. “I just thought he was a doctor.”
“In light of this new information,” said Vanderweigh, “any indication that he wasn’t who he said he was?”
I thought for a minute, then said, “No. We didn’t talk about medical things. Or hardware, for that matter. The only thing we talked about was women, and he did all the talking. He fooled me.”
“You said you didn’t like him.”
I shrugged.
“We’re trying to figure out who killed him, Mr. Coyne,” said Lipton.
“He was boring and I didn’t particularly like him,” I said. “But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him when I thought he was Dr. Paul Romano, and I still didn’t kill him now that you’ve told me his name was Owen Ransom. What did the police in Pennsylvania tell you about him?”
Lipton shuffled through the sheaf of papers on the table in front of him. He picked one up, glanced at it, then looked up at me. “Owen Ransom, twenty-eight years old. Grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Ran cross-country for his high-school team. Average student, no trouble of any kind. Couple years of community college. Never married. Parents both deceased. Taught Sunday school at the Congregational church. Lived by himself in a one-bedroom condominium on the outskirts of town. Held the same job at the hardware store for five years.”
“The profile of a madman,” I said.
Vanderweigh smiled. “You’d be surprised.”
“No,” I said. “Actually I wouldn’t. So what was he doing in Cortland if he wasn’t interested in buying Dr. St. Croix’s practice?”
“Well,” said Vanderweigh, “that’s the question, isn’t it?”
“And what’s this got to do with Larry Scott?” I stopped. “Wait a minute. Are you thinking … ?”
Vanderweigh shook his head. “If there’s a connection between Ransom and Scott, damned if we can figure out what it is. Except, of course, for the fact that they were both murdered.”
“Owen Ransom could’ve killed Larry Scott,” I said.
“Why?”
“How would I know?”
“Say he did,” said Lipton. “Then who killed Ransom?”
“Have you talked to Mel Scott?” I said.
“Who?”
“Larry’s brother.” I touched the bump on my cheekbone. “He loved his brother. He can be quite emphatic about it.”
Lipton and Vanderweigh exchanged looks. Then Vanderweigh leaned across the table to me. “What about Evelyn Banyon?”
“What about her?” I said.
“Has she ever been to Carlisle, Pennsylvania?”
“Jesus,” I said. “You guys are relentless.” I shook my head. “I have no idea whether Evie was ever in Carlisle, or if she knew this Owen Ransom.”
“You’re not much help today, Mr. Coyne,” said Vanderweigh.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “So, how long are you planning to keep Officer Kershaw on my tail?”
“For as long as it takes.”
“You think I’m going to lead you to Evie.”
Vanderweigh nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know where she is.”
Lipton shrugged, then gathered his papers into a stack, tapped the edges on the table, shoved them into a manila folder, and looked up at me. “You can find your way out okay, Mr. Coyne?”
I stood up. “Evie didn’t kill anybody.”
“We’d sure like to talk with her about it,” said Vanderweigh. “Have her tell us that in her own words.”
“I’ll pass along your message if I see her,” I said. I headed for the door.
“Mr. Coyne,” said Lipton.
I stopped and turned.
“If you think of something,” he said, “come up with anything, even a wild theory, you just have Officer Kershaw give us a call, okay?”
“I’m an officer of the court,” I said. “I know my duty.”
I left the police station. Valerie Kershaw was standing beside her cruiser talking to a white-haired woman who was holding a large black dog on a leash. I went over to her. “I’m heading back to my motel now,” I said. “I’ve got to make a couple of calls. Just wanted you to know, in case I inadvertently managed to elude you.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s about lunchtime.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I said. “Had a big breakfast. I’m just tired. They woke me up early.”
“I was thinking about myself, not you,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“Go get something to eat,” I said. “Meet me at my motel.”
She tilted her head and smiled at me. “I’m not allowed to trust you.”
I sighed. “Okay. I believe in supporting our officers of the law. Let’s go eat. Follow me.”
We drove to the diner, and when Valerie and I went in together, heads turned and conversations momentarily stopped.
We sat at a booth by the front window where Valerie could keep an eye on her cruiser. Ruth was back on duty. She seemed not the slightest bit surprised that I had a lunch date with a pretty uniformed police officer.
I had a turkey club sandwich and a glass of iced tea. Valerie had a cheeseburger and Coke. While we ate, she told me that she’d grown up in Gloucester, on the Massachusetts north shore, had gone to Williams College where she’d majored in history, and got her master’s in law enforcement at Northeastern.
Her father was a stockbroker and her mother was a high-school math teacher. No one in her family had ever been a cop. She’d been on the job for a year and a half, and she was thinking of quitting and going to law school. She believed her talents were being wasted, following people around all day in Cortland, Massachusetts. She thought she’d make a good prosecutor.
I didn’t try to talk her out of it.
When I asked her if she had a boyfriend, she rolled her eyes and looked away, which could have meant that she did but it wasn’t working out, or that she used to but it hadn’t worked out, or that she hadn’t met anybody interesting yet, or that she preferred women.
Or, most likely, that it was a rude question for a murder suspect to ask, and none of anybody’s business anyway.
After we finished eating, we drove back to the motel. Valerie parked her cruiser beside my car, and as I opened the door to my room, I saw that she was talking on her two-way.
The maid had come and made the bed and left me clean towels and given the room a squirt of Lysol. All traces of Evie were gone.
I stripped down, took a long steamy shower, then sprawled on the bed. I glanced at my watch. It was a little after two o’clock.
I picked up the phone beside the bed and dialed Julie’s home phone. I hoped my secretary would be off to the pool with Megan, her daughter, on this sunny Sunday afternoon in August. Then I could leave a message on her answering machine and escape her lecture on an attorney’s responsibilities to his clients and his secretary.
Edward, Julie’s husband, answered.
�
�It’s Brady,” I said. “Julie’s not there, is she?”
“No,” he said. “She took Megan to a birthday party.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
He chuckled. “You called her, but you don’t want to talk to her?”
“I was hoping just to leave her a message.”
“Do you want me to deliver your message?”
“Just tell her,” I said, “that I won’t be in the office tomorrow. She knows what to do.”
“Julie’s not going to like it,” said Edward. “You want me to convey your excuse, too?”
“Tell her that I’m down here in Cortland, looking for Evie. She might actually approve of that.”
“She might,” he said skeptically. “Anything else?”
“Tell her I’m sort of snooping around. There’s been another murder.”
Edward chuckled. “How do you do it?”
“What? Get into these situations?”
“No,” he said. “Come up with these stories.”
“Now you’ve hurt my feelings,” I said. “It’s not a story. It’s true.”
“Well, I’ll pass it along. You got a number there if she needs to reach you?”
I gave Edward the motel number. “If you think she’s tempted to call me,” I told him, “you could do me a favor and remind your wife that I’m the lawyer and she’s the secretary and her job is to do what I want.”
“She knows better than that, Brady. But I’ll do my best for you.”
I thanked Edward, hung up the phone, smoked a cigarette, stared up at the ceiling, then picked it up again and dialed information.
It took awhile to convince the mechanical voice to connect me to an actual person, but finally I got the number for the local weekly newspaper in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and even though it was a Sunday afternoon, when I rang that number, a raspy woman’s voice answered.
“Are you the editor?” I said.
“Editor, reporter, sales rep, chief bottle-washer,” she said. “Kate Burrows, at your service. Who’s this?”
“My name is Brady Coyne. I’m calling from Cortland, Massachusetts.” I paused, waiting for that to sink in.
She hesistated, then said, “Cortland … Oh. The Owen Ransom murder. Are you with the newspaper there?”
“No. I’m a lawyer. I have some information.”
“I’m all ears, Mr. Coyne.”
“Quid pro quo, Ms. Burrows.”
She chuckled. “Lawyers. Okay. What’ve you got for me, and what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me about Owen Ransom.”
“Do you know who killed him?”
“I’m afraid not. But I can tell you what he was doing here in Cortland. Fair?”
“Sure,” she said. “I hope you have more to tell me than I have for you.”
“You start,” I said.
She cleared her throat. “Understand, before this morning I’d never even heard of Owen Ransom. He wasn’t exactly famous around here. But a local boy gets himself murdered, I ask some questions, dig around in our archives, such as they are. The murder story will be front-page stuff, of course. I’m also trying to put together a sidebar about Mr. Ransom himself. You know, the human-interest piece of it. Mostly interviews with people who knew him. I haven’t gotten very far with that. Owen Ransom was apparently a quiet young man, lived by himself, not many friends. I did talk with the owner of the hardware store where Ransom worked, a Mr. Gallatin. He’s lived in Carlisle all his life. Knew Ransom’s parents. Told me one interesting thing.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“He told me that Owen Ransom had a lot of money socked away. Inherited it from his parents, who died several years ago. Mr. Gallatin knew the parents. The father was a high-school teacher, the mother a homemaker. When the Ransoms moved to Carlisle, they paid cash for their house. They lived modestly, but they donated extravagantly to charities. Way more than could be accounted for by a teacher’s salary, according to Mr. Gallatin. He told me that one time he’d casually asked Mr. Ransom—Owen’s father—how he’d come by his wealth. Expected him to say it was old family money or something, but Mr. Ransom said—and I’m looking at my notes now, Mr. Coyne, and this is exactly how Mr. Gallatin remembers it: Mr. Ransom said it had cost him every drop of his soul’s blood.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Mr. Gallatin didn’t know. But obviously the phrase stuck with him.”
I thought for a minute. “So Owen Ransom had money,” I said. “Who stands to inherit it?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know. What I’ve learned so far, he had no living relatives. I suppose the police will be looking into that.”
“What else can you tell me?”
“He attended the local schools. A decent student, never in trouble. Just a quiet, rather anonymous young man.” She paused. “And that’s about all I can tell you. Your turn.”
I told Kate Burrows what I knew—that Owen Ransom had come to Cortland using the name Paul Romano and posing as a doctor who wanted to buy the practice of a retiring local pediatrician and had been found in his rental car behind a motel with his throat cut. I told her that another young man, a native of Cortland, had been stabbed to death a week earlier down on Cape Cod.
She asked several clarifying questions, and I answered them as well as I could.
“And what,” she said when I finished, “is your interest in all of this, Mr. Coyne?”
“I’m a lawyer, Ms. Burrows. I can’t tell you.”
“Of course you can’t.” She chuckled. “Well, I hope I may call you later for further enlightenment.”
“Sure,” I said. “My number’s in the Boston book.”
After I hung up with Kate Burrows, I yawned, turned out the light, slid in between the sheets, and stared up at ceiling, looking for insight.
None appeared, and I was too sleepy to look harder.
I closed my eyes.
The last time I’d been in this bed, Evie had been with me. I’d held her naked body while we slept, and remembering the scent of her hair in my face and the silky, electric feel of her skin against mine and the slow rise and fall of her chest under my arm eased me into a deep, hungry sleep.
The bleating of the telephone woke me up. For a minute I thought I was in my bedroom back in Boston. The phone rang several times before I blinked the disorienting afternoon sleep out of my head and picked it up.
I cleared my throat and grumbled, “Hlo?” I figured it was Julie, calling to bawl me out.
“Mr. Coyne?” A woman’s voice. Not Julie’s.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“It’s Mary Scott, Mr. Coyne.”
I hitched myself into a half-sitting position in the bed. Afternoon sunlight streamed in around the drapes in my little motel room. “What time is it?” I said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. What’s the matter, Mrs. Scott?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Nothing’s the matter. I was just wondering if you might be able to drop by again. There’s something I want you to see.”
“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”
“Just something of Larry’s,” she said. “It wasn’t in his room, and I thought …”
“You’re making this sound a little mysterious, you know.”
She laughed quickly. “I guess I am, aren’t I?”
“I can be there in about half an hour,” I said. “Would that be all right?”
“That would be fine.”
“Um, Mrs. Scott? Mary?”
“Yes?”
“How did you know where to find me?”
She hesitated for a moment. “I guess you must’ve mentioned you were staying at the motel.”
“Right,” I said. “I guess I must have. Well, I’ll be right along.”
I hung up the phone. I was pretty sure I had not mentioned that I was staying in a motel room, either to Mary Scott or to Mel.
Small town. Everybody kn
ew everything.
FOURTEEN
I took a shower and let the cold water run over my face and chest for as long as I could stand it. It washed away the cobwebby blur of my afternoon nap, and by the time I’d dried myself and gotten dressed, I felt awake and reasonably alert.
I left my room, paid a dollar to the motel machine, and took a can of Coke to my car. I was alert enough to notice that Valerie Kershaw’s cruiser was not parked there. I looked around the nearly empty lot in front of the motel and saw no cruisers whatsoever. Nothing that even looked like a plainclothes cop car. No cars at all with anybody sitting in them.
Hmm.
I headed north on Route 1, past the diner, past the medical center, and past the village green, sipping my Coke and welcoming the little jolts of caffeine. I kept an eye on my rearview mirror. No cars of any description pulled in behind me.
I took the right after the old drive-in, followed the winding country road, and pulled up in front of her house on the edge of the woods.
The Ford Escort was still sitting in the driveway. So was Mel’s pickup truck. No legs were sticking out from under it.
I went to the house, climbed the steps, rapped on the frame of the screen door, and a moment later Mary Scott came out onto the porch. “Come on in,” she said.
I followed her into the house, through the living room, and into the kitchen. Mel was sitting at the table sipping from a can of Coors. An empty plate and a bottle of catsup sat in front of him. He’d washed his face and arms and slicked back his hair, but he was still wearing the same grimy T-shirt and blue jeans and workboots he’d had on in the morning.
He looked at me, touched his cheekbone with his fingertip, and said, “How you doin’?”
I nodded. “I’m fine. How about you?”
He pinched his nose gently between his thumb and forefinger and grinned. Then he held up his beer can. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.” I turned to Mary. “What’s up? What did you want to show me?”
She looked at Mel. He drained his beer, tossed the empty into the wastebasket beside the refrigerator, and stood up. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
“Wait,” said Mary. She left the kitchen and headed for the front of the house. She was back a minute later. “It’s okay,” she said to Mel.
Past Tense Page 16