Past Tense

by William G. Tapply

  “We got ’em.”

  “They killed Larry Scott and Owen Ransom and Dr. St. Croix,” I said, “and they burned down Mary Scott’s barn.”

  “Did they tell you that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Can’t you let him rest for a minute?” said the female voice.

  I turned my head and looked up into Valerie Kershaw’s face. It was sweat-stained and streaked with soot. She was cradling my head in her lap and holding that cool wet rag on my forehead.

  I smiled up at her. “Was that you who saved my life?”

  “I hauled you out of there, yes,” she said.

  I let my head fall back on her lap. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I closed my eyes. “Claudia gave me a drug, and Dwyer kept hitting me in the stomach,” I said. “I’m awfully tired. Can we talk later?”

  “Okay, so what did those two tell you?” said Detective Neil Vanderweigh.

  We were sitting at the conference table in the Cortland police station. Outside the window, the sky was just beginning to grow light. I was on my third mug of coffee. Caffeine seemed to be an effective antidote to the drug Claudia had shot into my arm, and the three aspirins Valerie gave me had taken the edge off the various aches and pains John Dwyer had left on my stomach and chest, although it hurt like hell when I tried to take a deep breath.

  “They didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “They asked me questions. Mainly they wanted to know where Evie was.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “Arizona.”

  He smiled. “She’s not in Arizona, is she?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. We know what we need to know.”

  “Did they talk?”

  He smiled. “Got them separated, mentioned the penalties for murder, arson, and kidnapping, and they were more than willing to blame each other.”

  “So you don’t need me, then.”

  “Oh,” he said, “You were a big help.”

  “You set me up, didn’t you?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Kind of. Sorry about that.”

  “I was your fucking decoy, huh?”

  “We had you covered. You were never in danger.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Dwyer kept slugging me in the stomach. He could’ve killed me. Then that drug, and the fire—”

  “I said I was sorry,” he said. “Point is, you’re okay, and we got the bad guys.”

  “So yesterday at Dr. St. Croix’s house,” I said, “after you talked with me, you interviewed everybody all over again, asked them new questions, fed them some tidbits about Ransom and Gorham, Minnesota, implying that I had the answers, and then you waited to see who’d take the bait. Right?”

  He smiled. “Something like that.”

  “You watched my motel room to see who’d show up.”

  “Officer Kershaw was hiding in the parking lot.”

  “You suspected Dwyer?”

  “No,” he said. “Dwyer was a surprise. Claudia Wells wasn’t, though. I thought she might’ve given the doctor an overdose.”

  “I didn’t quite buy that suicide note,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a suicide note,” he said. “It was just some scribbles he’d made, thinking about an interview he was going to do. She took it from his desk and left it beside his bed.”

  “So Claudia put the poor guy out of his misery, huh? Mercy killing, you think?”

  “Nope. Greed. He left everything to her.”

  I shook my head. “I was convinced she really cared about him.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I believe she did. She’s quite emotional about it.”

  “So why didn’t she just let him finish out his life? He had a disease that was going to kill him. She’d get her money soon enough.”

  “It could’ve taken years,” said Vanderweigh. “By then, the doctor might’ve been broke.”

  “Broke? Why?”

  “Larry Scott was blackmailing him.”

  I nodded. “And when Claudia found out about it, she killed Scott.”

  “She didn’t,” said Vanderweigh. “Dwyer killed Scott.”

  “Before Scott could bleed the doctor dry.”

  “Right. Scott was hitting him for ten grand a month, and the doctor was paying.”

  “So Dwyer followed him down the Cape …”

  “And saw the perfect opportunity to deflect suspicion onto you and Ms. Banyon.”

  I pointed my finger at Vanderweigh. “He did a damn good job of it, too. You bought it.”

  He shrugged.

  “So,” I said, “Dwyer and Claudia … ?”

  He nodded. “They were in it together. When she found out Larry Scott was blackmailing the doctor, she seduced Dwyer, promised to split her inheritance with him, got him to do the dirty work.”

  “So where did Owen Ransom fit into it?”

  “Ms. Wells was afraid Ransom was going to blackmail the doctor, too. She arranged to meet him that night—the night he annoyed you at the diner. Led him to believe that she was a lonely, small-town girl eager to fuck a studly out-of-town doctor. She’s a good-looking woman.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I noticed.”

  “So she seduced him into telling her his real intention.”

  “He was going to blackmail St. Croix, too?”

  “It’s not clear. Maybe. According to Ms. Wells, he never exactly said. But he had something on the doctor, and he was going to make him pay. She said those were his words: ‘Make him pay.’”

  I thought about that. “Revenge, maybe?”

  Vanderweigh nodded. “Could be. For what, though?”

  “For something that happened back in Gorham, Minnesota, when they were both living there.”

  He shrugged.

  “So Claudia cut Ransom’s throat.”

  “Dwyer did that,” said Vanderweigh.

  “Didn’t Claudia say what these guys had on St. Croix, that they were blackmailing him for?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think she knows. All she knows is that the doctor was paying Scott, so it had to be something real. It started with Scott shortly after the announcement of St. Croix’s retirement hit the newspapers. Then along came Ransom. The only solution was to get rid of those two, and then get rid of the doctor before somebody else came along.”

  “Nobody could blackmail him if he was dead,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Be nice to know what they had on him, though.”

  “Your friend Ms. Banyon might know.”

  “She might,” I said. “Wherever she is.”

  Vanderweigh bought me breakfast at the diner, which seemed to me to be the least he could do, then drove me back to the Cortland Motor Inn, where my car was waiting for me outside my room. They’d fetched it for me from where Claudia had left it in the woods. She’d followed behind Dwyer when he drove me to the cabin. Their plan was to make it look like I’d decided to spend the night there in Larry’s cabin. There were plenty of people who’d heard me complain about my claustrophobic motel room. If Vanderweigh and Valerie Kershaw hadn’t rescued me, it would’ve appeared that I’d had a few beers, flopped down on the bunk, and then knocked over the kerosene lantern. Tragic accident.

  I slid out of Vanderweigh’s car, and he did, too. It was eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning in mid-August, and already the sun was steaming off the pavement of the motel parking lot.

  We leaned side by side against his car.

  Vanderweigh squinted up at the cloudless sky. “Gonna be another hot one.”

  “Looks like.”

  “Guess you’ll be heading back to the city, huh?”

  “In the blink of an eye,” I said.

  “I hope you don’t expect an apology from me.”

  “You owe me one,” I said, “but I don’t expect to get it.”

  He turned his head, looked at me for a minute, then
smiled. “We’ll be in touch with you.”

  “The DA will want to depose me.”

  “I expect so. Ms. Banyon, too.”

  “If you can find her.”

  “Oh,” he said, “we’ll find her.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  I cleaned out my room, paid my bill at the motel office, and a little over an hour later I was in my apartment on Lewis Wharf on the Boston waterfront.

  Cortland, Massachusetts suddenly seemed far away and long ago.

  I loaded up my electric coffee pot, soaked in the shower, slipped into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and took a mug of coffee and my portable phone out onto my balcony, where there was always a cool, salty breeze coming in off the water, even on a scorching August day.

  I called Julie at the office and told her I was home but not feeling well, so I was taking the rest of the day off. She wanted to know all about it, of course. I told her I was too tired to talk and it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Then I tried Evie’s number at home.

  Her machine answered, as I’d expected. “It’s Evie. I can’t come to the phone right now, but your call is important to me, so please leave a message and I’ll get back to you, I promise.”

  I wasn’t at all sure she’d get back to me, but I left a message anyway: “It’s Tuesday. A lot has happened since I talked to you, even though that was just yesterday. Seems like a year ago. I want to tell you all about it. Preferably in person. Anyhow, it’s all over. Detective Vanderweigh arrested Claudia Wells and Officer John Dwyer this morning for the murders of Larry Scott and Owen Ransom and Dr. Winston St. Croix. Maybe you didn’t know about the doctor. I assume you were long gone by the time that happened. The good news is, you and I are no longer suspects, and the people who wanted to hurt us are safely locked up. So wherever you are, honey, you can come home. Will you? I hope you will.” I cleared my throat. “I sure do miss you.”

  After that, I called Marcus Bluestein, Evie’s boss at Emerson Hospital. I told him that I’d found Evie and then lost her again.

  He hadn’t heard from her.

  Then I hobbled into my bedroom, dropped my clothes on the floor, and crawled in between the cool sheets.

  When I woke up, the day had passed and it was dark outside.

  The following Friday afternoon I was at my desk still trying to catch up on all the paperwork that had accumulated in the few days I’d been gone when Julie buzzed me.

  Marcus Bluestein was on the phone. “I just talked to her,” he said.

  “Evie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Well,” he said, “she said she was fine.”

  “But?”

  Bluestein blew out a breath. “But she told me she wanted to quit.”

  “Quit her job with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Where is she?”

  “She didn’t say. She didn’t say much of anything, Brady, and I didn’t push her. She was full of apologies, but it was pretty clear she’d made up her mind.” He chuckled. “You know Evie.”

  “Nobody really knows Evie,” I said.

  “I told her I wouldn’t allow her to quit,” he said. “I told her I was giving her an indefinite leave of absence. Her job will be waiting for her whenever she wants it.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She said thank you.”

  “Do you think that means … ?”

  “That she’ll come back?” He paused. “I don’t know, Brady. Maybe. She knows I’ll have to train temporary help, and it wouldn’t be like Evie to let me do that unless she was at least considering coming back.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s good news.”

  “I assume she hasn’t been in touch with you.”

  “No” I said. “She called you, not me.”

  The next day was Saturday, exactly a week after I’d driven down to Cortland, and two weeks from the day that Evie had found Larry Scott’s dead body in the driveway in Brewster.

  A lot had happened in those two weeks.

  Normally Evie and I would play on a weekend. On a summer Saturday, we might drive to Rockport or Tanglewood, or we’d just stroll through the Common and down Newbury Street and maybe end up in Fenway Park, or if it was raining we’d go to a museum. We’d cook and eat and make love and play Trivial Pursuit and watch a movie on television and make love some more, and we’d shower together and sleep together, and on Sunday we’d do the same things again.

  Now Evie was gone—maybe for good—and I figured I might have to work out a different definition of a “normal” weekend for myself.

  I was tempted to mope around my apartment, pondering my many sins and missing Evie. Instead I drove to the Swift River out near Amherst and went trout fishing.

  The Swift is one of the most heavily fished rivers in the world, but I know a stretch downstream from the Route 9 bridge where I can usually find some solitude as well as trout, even on a summer weekend.

  I spent a lot of time sitting on the bank, smoking and daydreaming and looking at the water. There was a big aching hole in my chest where Evie used to be, and even trout fishing couldn’t fill it up. I didn’t want to believe that she was gone. But I knew I better get used to the idea.

  I caught a few small, easy trout, and then I spotted a bigger one rising irregularly just off the tip of a fallen tree against the opposite bank. He was a rainbow of sixteen or seventeen inches, and I guessed that he was eating the occasional tiny blue-winged olive mayflies that I saw drifting on the river’s surface. I watched that fish feed until I thought I had gauged his rhythm, and the first time I managed to float my little bluish gray dry fly over him, his nose poked out of the water and he ate it.

  He pulled hard and jumped once, and after he tired himself out, I steered him in beside me, reached down, and tweaked the hook from his lip without lifting him from the water.

  He stayed right there by my feet for a minute, working his gills and slowly waving his tail in the soft current. When I touched him with the toe of my boot, he darted away.

  And so for a while, at least, I didn’t think about Evie.

  The next day I called Mary Scott in Cortland. She told me that stories about Claudia Wells and John Dwyer and Dr. St. Croix were flying around town, and she made it clear she wanted me to tell her my version.

  I told her that as a witness I couldn’t say anything about it, and that I’d just called to see how she and Mel were making out.

  She said she was doing as well as could be expected, thank you, and if I’d like to talk to Mel, he was out in the yard working on his truck.

  I said I would. She said she’d get him for me.

  A couple of minutes later, he picked up the phone. “How you doin’, Mr. Coyne?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “You?”

  “They burned down Larry’s cabin, you know. He’s gonna be some pissed.”

  He was still thinking about his brother in the present tense.

  “Mel,” I said, “remember I told you about that hidey-hole under Larry’s cot in the cellar of the barn?”

  “Yup. I remember.”

  “Did you look there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And?”

  “There was a box of money.”

  “It didn’t get burned in the fire?”

  “Nope. The box was all soggy, but the money was in a plastic bag.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I put it back like you tole me.”

  “Did you count it?”

  “Nope. I just seen what it was and put it right back. Looked like a lot.”

  “That was Larry’s money,” I said. “Now it’s yours. Yours and your mother’s. You should use it. Maybe repair your barn, get your workshop up and running again.”

  “That’s Larry’s money,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “it was Larry’s money. Past tense. He can’t use it now. He’d want you to have it.” />
  “You think?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But—”

  “Mel, goddamn it, get that money. Do what I tell you.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “Your brother’s dead,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Mel softly. “I know that.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  In the middle of the morning on the Thursday after Labor Day, Julie came into my office with the day’s mail. I was on the phone with Frances Dawkins, who had finally decided to leave her husband after ignoring his infidelities for twenty-seven years. She wanted to talk about what a prick he was. I wanted to talk about her credit-card debts and her husband’s 401K and their summer house on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Julie stood in front of my desk with her hands on her hips.

  I rolled my eyes at her.

  She pointed at the stack of mail and mouthed the words: Look at it.

  I shrugged. Julie always opens the mail and keeps the interesting stuff—the bills and checks and assorted legal papers—leaving the catalogs and bulk mailings for me to toss.

  She pointed again, and I nodded and waved my hand. She gave me a hard look, then left my office.

  “Listen, Frances,” I said into the phone. “Whether he’s a prick or not is irrelevant. You want a divorce, you can have a divorce. The only thing the judge will care about is whether the settlement is equitable. We’re just trying to get the best deal for you, okay?”

  Frances said that as far as she was concerned, the best deal would involve fixing up the philandering bastard with Lorena Bobbitt and letting nature take its course.

  I told her the best revenge was taking the bastard to the cleaners.

  It was exhausting work, and it didn’t much resemble what I’d envisioned for my career when I was in law school. Back then, I aspired to argue important constitutional issues before the Supreme Court.

  But as Julie kept reminding me, phone conversations with clients added up in billable hours, even if all they really amounted to was amateur therapy.

  After I finally soothed Frances Dawkins and convinced her to switch over to Julie to set up another appointment, I lit a cigarette and picked up the mail.