Muscle Memory

by William G. Tapply

“That’s okay. What’s up? Did you track down Will Powers?”

  “Yes. Had a good talk with him. You were right.”

  “How so?”

  “He seems like a pretty good kid. Too bad you couldn’t hang onto him.”

  “I agree. I hate it when kids drop out.”

  “He says he didn’t stalk Kaye Fallon, never tried to kiss her.”

  “Did I say he did?”

  “You removed him from her class.”

  “I did. Based on what Kaye told me.”

  “Was Kaye an hysteric?”

  “I certainly never thought so.”

  “Did she flirt with her students?”

  “Is that what Will said?”

  “I’m just trying to read between the lines, Ron.”

  “Well, I never observed anything like that.”

  “Did she flirt with you?”

  “Huh? That’s ridiculous.” He paused. “She was very friendly and approachable, of course,” he said slowly. “Good teachers generally are. And she was certainly attractive. Always dressed well, paid attention to her makeup. But she was quite proper with everybody. Certainly with me.”

  “This afternoon you mentioned putting her name in for ten­ure.”

  “Right. I did.”

  “Did she get it?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “The usual reason, Mr. Coyne. Budget. The school committee didn’t think it would be fiscally sound to grant tenure to a permanent substitute. In fact, they eliminated the position.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kaye was without a job. Well, I could still use her as a regular sub, of course. On the usual per diem. Which I hoped to do.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Just a couple weeks ago. I’d talked them into reconsidering, but they wouldn’t change their minds.”

  “What did Kaye say when you told her?”

  Moyle hesitated. “Actually, I never did tell her.”

  “She didn’t know?”

  “I suspect she heard it through the grapevine. I put it off, to tell you the truth. I hate to give people bad news. I think she was counting on that security. With her divorce and all. Anyway, I finally sent her a message in class, asked her to see me after school. She didn’t show up.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last week. Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  “Just a few days before she died,” I said.

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this when we talked this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t ask. It didn’t seem relevant. Is it?”

  “What?”

  “Is it relevant?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But if you can think of any reason why it might be, you should tell me.”

  “Well, I can’t.” He cleared his throat. “What are you thinking?

  “I’m just trying to understand Kaye, her life, people who knew her, that’s all.”

  “But you drove all the way from Boston to see me in my office, then you turn around and call me at home…”

  “Will Powers implied that you might’ve been, um, close to Kaye.”

  “Close?” He was silent for a moment. “That’s quite an ac­cusation to make of a principal.”

  “I didn’t mean it as an accusation, Ron.”

  “Well,” he said, and he made his voice low as if he didn’t want to be overheard, “I had no personal relationship with Mrs. Fallon whatsoever. I would be delighted if you’d check up with anyone you can think of to verify that. And I’ve got to tell you, I resent it. You’ve got no right—”

  “I said it wasn’t an accusation,” I said quickly.

  “Look, Mr. Coyne. My daughters are here with their pajamas on. I always read to them at bedtime.”

  “That’s nice. I envy you.”

  “If I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You should.”

  By the time I hung up with Ron Moyle, a fine mist had begun to fall. I took the phone inside, sat at the table, lit a cigarette, and watched the fog and mist move over the water.

  Then I dialed the Ritz and asked to be connected to Sylvie’s room.

  After a dozen rings, the switchboard operator, a woman with a faint Smokey Mountain twang, said, “Ms. Szabo does not appear to be answering, sir. Shall I keep ringing?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess she’s not there.”

  “May I take a message?”

  “No, that’s all right. You don’t know when she’s expected in, do you?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  I disconnected, put the phone on the table, and let out a long breath. I couldn’t figure out whether I was disappointed or re­lieved.

  Nine

  SOMETIME A LITTLE BEFORE noon the next morning, Julie buzzed me. “Attorney Cooper’s on line one,” she said.

  “Got it,” I said. I punched the button on my console and said, “Brady Coyne.”

  “Hi, Brady,” she said. “It’s Barbara. Barbara Cooper.”

  “How can I help you, Ms. Cooper?” Damned if I was going to fall into the first-name, buddy-buddy trap she was laying for me. The last time I’d talked with Barbara Cooper, she’d informed me that she intended to castrate Mick—figuratively, of course—in divorce court.

  “You can’t help me,” she said. “I thought I might help you.” She paused, and when I didn’t say anything, she continued, “The state’s attorney has subpoenaed the Fallon deposition. I thought you should know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “They also interrogated me at length. I cooperated fully.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No reason not to.”

  “They wanted to know everything Mrs. Fallon had told me about her marriage, her husband, his finances, plus my observations of your client. Client privilege, it seems to me, does not apply here.”

  “Your client being dead.”

  “Right.”

  “Well,” I said, “I have no problem with that. We’re all after the same thing. My client is innocent.”

  “Of course he is,” she said, and if she intended to be sarcastic, I didn’t detect it in her tone. “Anyway,” she said, “I just wanted—”

  “To get it off your conscience,” I said.

  She chuckled. “You’re a hard case, Brady. No, my conscience is not involved in this. Call it professional courtesy. I didn’t have to call you.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  “If you were sincerely appreciative,” she said, “you’d offer to buy me a drink sometime.”

  “Why?” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Want?” I heard her sigh. “Believe it or not, I don’t want a damn thing, except maybe a relaxing drink.”

  “I’ll call you sometime,” I said.

  “You ought to,” she said. “You probably think I’m some kind of ball-buster, but I can be pretty good company when I’m away from the office.”

  I didn’t tell her that “ball-buster” was precisely what I thought she was. If Barbara Cooper wanted to have a drink with me, I assumed it was because she had an agenda.

  Sometime in the afternoon I called Mick. Nothing had changed. He hadn’t heard from Danny or Erin again, and he was still going batshit. I decided not to tell him that the state’s attorney seemed to be putting together a case against him. No sense in upsetting him any more.

  I left the office on foot around six-thirty, feeling quite virtuous at the dent I’d made in my paperwork. I stopped off for a burger and beer at Skeeter’s, where I watched the first three innings of the Red Sox game, and got home around nine.

  After I changed out of my lawyer clothes, I took the phone out to the balcony, lit a cigarette, watched a ferry chug across the harbor, and called the Ritz.

  “I decided you weren’t going to call me,” Sylvie said when they connected me to her room.
r />   “Of course I was going to call you. I tried last night, but you weren’t there.”

  “Well,” she said softly, “I’m here now. Where are you?”

  “I just got home. Long day.”

  “Do you still walk to the office?”

  “Usually, yes.”

  “You walk right past the Ritz, and you don’t even stop to see if Sylvie’s here waiting for you?”

  “It would’ve been an inspired idea,” I said. “Guess I’ve been pretty preoccupied lately.”

  “Ah, yes. That terrible murder that Brady must solve.”

  “I’m not trying to solve it, honey. I’m just trying to help my client.”

  “Brady is always such a helpful person.”

  “That sounded almost sarcastic, Sylvie. Has New York City turned you into a cynic?”

  “Maybe it has,” she said. “Or maybe I just thought you’d be happier to see me.”

  “You caught me at a bad time, but I was happy to see you. I do want to see you again, when I’m more relaxed. What about dinner tomorrow night. Say six-thirty?”

  “I’ll be waiting in the bar.”

  The phone woke me up a little before seven the next morning.

  “Horowitz,” he growled when I picked it up.

  “Christ,” I yawned. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Hardly ever,” he said. “Waste of time.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Thought you might want to bring your client around this morning.”

  “I’ve got a lot of clients.”

  “You know the one I’m interested in.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m doing you a courtesy here, okay?”

  “You planning on arresting Mick?”

  “I didn’t say that. So you gonna bring him in, or do I send a fleet of squad cars over to his place with their sirens wailing and their flashers going?”

  “Oh, I’ll bring him over,” I said. “I guess I’m just a bit speechless here at your unprecedented and uncharacteristic concern for his feelings, that’s all. ‘Courtesy’ is a word I don’t normally associate with you.”

  “Me, neither. Rather you didn’t say anything about it.” Horowitz chuckled. “Figure Fallon won’t talk to us without you holding his hand anyway, might as well get the two of you here at the same time, save my boys a trip in the bargain.”

  “You going to tell me what this is about?”

  “When you get here,” he said. “Shoot for nine o’clock. Much later, there’ll be sirens. I’ll be at the Leverett Circle barracks.”

  I hesitated. “This for routine questioning?”

  “Don’t push me, Coyne. No questioning is routine. You know that.”

  “Does that mean you’ve got some new information?”

  “Just bring your client here. And don’t try to give me any lectures about discovery. I know the law as well as you do.”

  Horowitz hung up on me the way he usually did—without saying good-bye. I fetched a mug of coffee, brought it into the bathroom, and sipped it between showering and shaving and getting dressed.

  Then I poured a refill and called Mick. When his machine answered, I told him to pick up, and when he didn’t, I told his tape that he should get his ass out of bed and put some clothes on, because I’d be there in an hour. I didn’t say why. No sense making him anxious.

  I pulled up in front of Mick’s three-decker in Somerville a little bit after eight. The Apartment for Rent sign still hung on the chain-link fence, and the trash barrels and wooden rocking chairs and dead flowers still decorated the rickety front porch.

  I went into the cramped entryway and rang Mick’s bell. A little square grate above the button indicated that Mick could speak to me through an intercom. I waited for a minute, then rang the bell again. He didn’t answer.

  Well, my phone call hadn’t roused him from bed, and I guessed the doorbell wasn’t doing the job, either. When I’d been there on Tuesday, Lyn Conley had said the door didn’t lock. I tried the knob. He was right. So I climbed the two flights of dark, steep stairs up to Mick’s apartment and knocked on the door that opened into his kitchen.

  I paused, listened, knocked again, then called, “Hey, Mick. Wake up.”

  When he didn’t answer or come to the door, terrible thoughts began to ricochet through my head. I pictured Mick’s enormous, white, bloated body crammed into a bathtub full of red water. Mick hanging from a rafter, his face swollen and blue. Mick lying in his bed, an empty jar of sleeping pills and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table beside him. Mick sprawled in his leather armchair, a big smear of blood and brains on the wall behind him and a nine-millimeter automatic on the floor beside him.

  He’d been holed up in this dreary place since Tuesday morning with only his tortured thoughts and his blue goldfish for company, dreading the moment when he’d have to face his children, imagining the accusation he might see in their eyes.

  I tried the doorknob. It turned in my hand. I pushed the door open and stepped into Mick’s kitchen.

  Beer cans, booze bottles, plastic glasses, and coffee mugs filled the sink and littered the table, but I saw no dirty saucepans or plates or opened soup cans or half-eaten sandwiches in the two-day accumulation since we’d cleaned it up together. It looked like Mick had been drinking plenty, but had eaten nothing.

  One of the wooden chairs had tipped over. I picked it up and pushed it back to the table. The door out onto his little porch was ajar. I pulled it shut. “Hey, Mick,” I called. “Rise and shine.”

  I noticed the telephone and answering machine on the counter beside the stove. The red light on the machine was blinking slowly and steadily, indicating just one message. That was probably mine from an hour ago. Either Mick had been erasing his messages, or he’d been answering the phone before the machine picked up. Or maybe no one except me had called him.

  I spoke his name again, and when he didn’t answer, I headed into the living room.

  The first thing I noticed was the overturned wing chair and the sofa, shoved at an odd angle against the wall. Then I saw the big wet splotch on the threadbare fake-oriental carpet in front of the television. Big shards and slices of glass were scattered over the puddle, and in the middle of the shattered bowl lay the corpse of Mick’s blue goldfish. Neely, he’d called it, after the hockey player. His daughter had given it to him to keep him company. Neely’s mouth was open, and his scales and his boggled lidless eyes were dull.

  I muttered, “Oh, shit,” and picked my way around the broken goldfish bowl to Mick’s bedroom. The door was wide open.

  Mick’s bed was empty and the covers were thrown back, as if he had just gotten up. Something on the pillow caught my eye. A big brownish red splotch stained the pillow and the sheet. It had to be blood. It looked as if it had seeped deep into the mat­tress. I gingerly touched it with my fingertip. It was dry and stiff.

  I yelled for Mick again, although I didn’t expect him to an­swer.

  Neither he nor his dead body was in the bathroom, or in either of the two small closets, or out on the little back porch off the kitchen. I noticed that a narrow wooden stairway without rails led down to the porch off the second floor. A fire escape, I guessed. I wondered if it would hold Mick’s weight.

  I hurried down to the second-floor landing, banged on the door, and yelled, “Open up! It’s an emergency!”

  When no one answered, I remembered the Apartment for Rent sign. This had to be the empty one.

  I took the stairs down to the first floor two at a time, then pounded the heel of my fist against the door to the first-floor apartment.

  It opened almost instantly, and a short bald man wearing a sleeveless undershirt, baggy black pants, and bedroom slippers was glaring at me. “Hey, what’s a-matter with you? You want me to call the cops, mister?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I said. “Something’s happened to Mick on the third floor.”

  “Wha
ddya mean?”

  “I need to use your phone.”

  He cocked his head and peered at me through his round, rimless glasses. Then he shrugged. “Sure, right. Come on in.”

  He led me through a short hallway into a living room that was considerably larger than Mick’s. Like Mick’s, it was domi­nated by a big console television, which was tuned to a news program. The room was crammed with dark old furniture, and it smelled of burned bacon and raw garlic.

  He pointed at an old-fashioned rotary telephone on a table beside the sofa, then turned the sound off the television.

  I sat down and dialed the state police barracks at Leverett Circle. When the receptionist answered, I said, “I need to talk to Lieutenant Horowitz. This is Attorney Brady Coyne. It’s about an appointment I have with him.”

  A minute later, Horowitz said, “What’s up?”

  “You better get over here,” I said. “Mick’s gone, and there’s blood.”

  “Okay,” he said, instantly all business. “Where are you?”

  “First-floor apartment.” I gave him Mick’s address, then arched my eyebrows at the bald man, who was standing in the middle of the room staring at me. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Mancini,” he said. “Anthony Mancini. This is my house.”

  “I’m with Mr. Mancini,” I told Horowitz. “He’s the landlord.” I looked on the phone and gave him Mancini’s telephone number.

  “Both of you, sit tight,” said Horowitz. “Don’t touch anything or let anybody in. The Somerville cops’ll be there in a couple minutes to secure it. I’ll be right along. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  When I hung up, Anthony Mancini said, “What’s going on?”

  “My name is Coyne,” I said. “I’m Mick Fallon’s lawyer. He’s gone, and it looks like something might’ve happened to him.”

  “Whaddya mean, happened to him?”

  “He’s gone. There’s blood on his bed. The furniture is tipped over. His door was unlocked.”

  Mancini crossed himself. “Holy mother of God,” he murmured. “You think…?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “Have you heard or noticed anything?”

  He shrugged. “Empty apartment between us. I hear nothing that goes on up on the third floor.”

  “Nobody coming up or down the stairs during the night?”