Muscle Memory

by William G. Tapply

  Then he spoke. “Coyne, right?”

  I nodded. “You’re Patsy. Or Paulie. I get you two confused.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Mr. Russo wants to talk to you.”

  I shut the car door and started for the elevator. “Tell him to call my office for an appointment,” I said. “On second thought, don’t bother. I’m all booked up.”

  He moved beside me and touched my arm. “Mr. Russo wants to share some information with you. About a friend of yours. Mick Fallon?”

  I squinted at him. “It’s Patsy, right?” I said. “You’re the one who does the talking.”

  “Mr. Russo’s waiting, Mr. Coyne. He don’t like being kept waiting. It shows disrespect.”

  “He’s got information for me?”

  Patsy shrugged.

  “Where is he?”

  “Parked on the street. He came to you. That shows great re­spect.”

  “Um,” I said. “Flattering. Okay. Let me put my stuff back in the car.”

  I did, and when I was done Patsy said, “Sorry, I gotta frisk you.” He patted me down, then led me out of the garage.

  At the end of the block, we turned left, and there, parked next to the curb, sat a big silver Mercedes with tinted windows. The headlights were on and the motor was idling.

  Patsy opened the back door, then stood aside.

  A gravelly voice from inside said, “Mr. Coyne. Thank you for coming. I assume Patsy treated you courteously, huh?”

  I bent down to look in. Vincent Russo was wearing a dark suit and hornrims with yellow lenses. He was a small, dapper man in his sixties—steely hair brushed back tight against his scalp, thin lips, pale skin, dark hooded eyes. His picture appeared in newspapers regularly, but I’d never seen him in person before.

  “Patsy was the perfect gentleman, as always,” I said. “He mentioned Mick Fallon.”

  “Please. Sit in here with me so we can talk private.”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not all that eager to get into a car with you, Mr. Russo.”

  He lifted one hand, then let it fall onto his thigh. “We are not enemies, Mr. Coyne. You have nothing to fear. You got my word on it, huh?”

  “You have information on Mick Fallon?”

  “You’re his attorney. There are some things perhaps you should know.” He looked up at me and smiled coldly. “We can help each other, huh?” He patted the seat beside him.

  I hesitated, quite certain that I was about to do something foolhardy or worse. I could hear Charlie when I told him about it. “You did what?” he’d say.

  There were a million reasons why I should not get into the backseat of Vincent Russo’s Mercedes on a dark Boston side street on a quiet Sunday night in June.

  So I bent down and slid in beside the most notorious mobster in Boston.

  Patsy shut the door behind me. It latched with the sound of finality. I wondered if Russo’s Mercedes was equipped with dis­abled rear door latches, making a backseat guest such as me a prisoner. I resisted the impulse to find out, on the grounds that it would betray my discomfort.

  A man with a thick neck sat stolidly behind the wheel up front. I looked at Russo, then pointed my chin at the driver.

  He nodded. “Paulie, leave us alone, huh?” he said softly.

  Paulie immediately switched off the headlights and ignition, got out, and shut the door behind himself. I noticed that the dome light did not go on when the door opened. Paulie went around to the front of the car, leaned against the fender, crossed his arms, and gazed up the street.

  I turned to Russo. “You have information about Mick Fal­lon?”

  He shrugged. “Who besides you, I ask myself, might suggest to Lieutenant Horowitz that Patsy and Paulie could be in­volved?”

  “Oh, I’d give Lieutenant Horowitz more credit than that.”

  He made a little backhanded brush-off gesture. “No matter, Mr. Coyne. If you mentioned it, you were only doing your job. I respect that. But I want you to understand that Mick’s health and happiness is very important to me.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell him when I see him.”

  “You’re mocking me, huh?” he said. “That’s okay. Sometimes I beat around the bush. Let me be straight with you, okay?” He reached over, tapped my knee, and held my gaze with those lizard eyes. “We didn’t whack him, Mr. Coyne.”

  “It never occurred to me that you did.”

  He nodded and smiled. “Of course it did. But let me assure you. Nobody whacked him, okay?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Mick has enemies, Mr. Coyne. But they won’t hurt him, because they know it would upset me.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Russo shrugged. “We know people who can help us find out, and sooner or later we will.”

  “The police are looking for him, too,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Russo. “And the way I figure it, Mick is already feeling all those nooses drawing tight around his neck. At some point he’ll have to get in touch with somebody he trusts, huh?” He arched his eyebrows.

  “If you think I’m going to turn Mick over to you,” I said, “you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”

  “It would be best for everybody if you did, Mr. Coyne. You should trust me on this.”

  “Is this a threat, Mr. Russo?”

  He held up both hands, palms out. “I’m a civilized man, sir.”

  “Good-bye,” I said. I tried the back door handle, and it worked. I got out of the car.

  “Mr. Coyne,” he said.

  I bent down and looked in at him.

  “A shame, what happened to Mick’s beautiful wife.” He shook his head. “Terrible, terrible tragedy, huh? Thing like that, I always feel worst for the children. Those two beautiful kids of his. Erin and Danny. College kids, huh?”

  I stared at him.

  “Well,” he said after a minute. “Let’s keep in touch, huh?” He held out his hand for me to shake.

  I looked at it but did not take it. I shook my head, turned, and headed back to my car in the underground garage. I half expected Patsy and Paulie to follow me and try to teach me a lesson in respect. But they didn’t.

  When I got to my apartment, I went directly to the cabinet over the refrigerator. I took down my jug of Rebel Yell, poured several fingers over a handful of ice cubes, and carried it out onto my balcony. I noticed that my hand was shaking.

  Bad enough that he had threatened me. But that son of a bitch had also threatened Danny and Erin.

  I plopped down in my aluminum chair, lit a cigarette, tried to think straight.

  Okay. Who stood to gain from Kaye Fallon’s death?

  Vincent Russo, that’s who.

  If Mick’s divorce had proceeded, he would’ve been wiped out. I knew that, and I hadn’t hidden it from Mick. Kaye would’ve gotten the house and most of their savings and investments. Mick would’ve been left with his problems with the IRS, and Russo, who I figured held Mick’s gambling debts, would never collect what Mick owed him.

  But with Kaye dead, whatever Mick had was all his to dispose of as he chose. Her life insurance was a bonus. Russo’s boys could descend upon him and pick him as clean as a murder of crows on yesterday’s roadkill.

  Vincent Russo knew all this, of course. Men like Vincent Russo knew these things.

  A couple of things about this theory didn’t really fit. First, Kaye’s murder was hardly in the style of the Vincent Russos of the world. It was messy and passionate. Of course, he could’ve set it up to look that way. But in so doing, he’d have been pointing the finger directly at Mick, and that contradicted his interests. If Mick were convicted of Kaye’s murder, Russo wouldn’t be able to collect what Mick owed him. If Russo had set it up, he would’ve made absolutely sure it couldn’t be pinned on Mick.

  Or maybe I was giving Vincent Russo way too much credit.

  I continued smoking, sipping my Rebel Yell, and gazing out over the harbor. But I came up wit
h no new insights. Vincent Russo was looking for Mick. He was willing to hurt anybody—even Danny and Erin—to collect what Mick owed him. Sure. He might’ve ordered Kaye’s murder.

  When my glass was empty, I went inside. I loaded the coffee machine, stripped down, took a long hot shower, brushed my teeth, and went into my bedroom. I felt a bit more relaxed. Maybe I’d get some sleep after all.

  Then I saw that the answering machine beside my bed was blinking. Wink-wink, pause. Two calls.

  Sylvie, maybe. Or maybe even Alex. I wouldn’t have minded a message from either of them.

  I pressed the button. The tape whirred, beeped, then clicked. I heard the fuzzy buzz of the empty tape playing. There was no message. Just one minute of static before the disconnection.

  Another beep, another click. More recorded silence.

  I was sitting in the backseat of a big car—it might’ve been a limousine—parked close to the bank of a pretty, slow-moving river. Through the tinted window I was watching Billy, my older son, who stood knee-deep in the water casting dry flies to the huge rainbow trout that were sipping insects off the glassy surface. The slashes along the sides of those trout were crimson, the color of fresh-spilled blood, and when they rose for an insect, they porpoised, their entire bodies arcing out of the water, their eyes big and greedy.

  Billy was casting beautiful, graceful loops, and he seemed to raise a trout on every cast, and every time he hooked one, he turned to me with a big grin, raised his fist in the air, and shouted, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  I rattled and shook the handle on the inside of the car door, trying to get it open so I could leap out and join my son in the river, but the handle broke off in my hand. I tried using it as a hammer, banging and smashing at the window, trying to break the glass so I could get out of that car, and all that banging set off the car’s alarm, which kept shrilling—

  I groped on my bedside table for the phone, knocked it off its cradle, fumbled it to my ear. “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  “You sleeping?”

  I pushed myself into a sitting position in bed and switched ears. “Mick? Is that you?”

  “Sorry to wake you up. We gotta talk.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem. Are you okay?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “Lousy trick,” I said. “Erin and Danny—hell, all of us—we’re thinking…”

  “I know,” said Mick.

  I rubbed my face. “Have you been trying to reach me?”

  “Yeah. I let it ring, but you weren’t answering.”

  “What the hell time is it?”

  “Little after three.”

  “Actually, I appreciate the call. You interrupted a nightmare.” I flicked on the light beside my bed, found my cigarettes, got one lit. “Mick, what the hell are you doing? Where are you?”

  “I wanted you to know I was okay. I thought you’d be worried.”

  “Yeah, well, of course I was,” I said. “We all are. What’s going on?”

  “I just had to get away,” he said. “I needed some space. Christ, it was worse than being in prison.”

  “All that blood?”

  He chuckled. “Nosebleed. It’s what gave me the idea.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “You had me fooled. It was the goldfish that did it more than the blood.”

  “Huh? Whaddya mean?”

  “Breaking the goldfish bowl, killing the fish. I figured you loved that fish that Erin gave you. When I saw that dead fish, any thought I might’ve had that you set it up just went right out of my head.”

  Mick was silent for so long that I said, “Mick? You still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” He blew out a breath. “Listen, I didn’t do that to Neely.”

  “You didn’t? Then who—”

  “Fucking Russo,” he said. “Who else? See? I got out of there in the nick of time, man.”

  “Mick, listen to me,” I said. “I’m your lawyer, right? Here’s what I want you to do. Wherever the hell you are, go to the nearest police station, okay? Do it right now, as soon as we hang up. Tell them who you are, tell them there’s a warrant out for your arrest, and tell them to lock you up and call the state police. Tell them to get ahold of Lieutenant Horowitz, and—”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “They want to arrest me?”

  “Yes, Mick. So go to the police.”

  He was silent for a long minute. Then he said, “I’m not turning myself in, Brady.”

  “Mick, God damn it, listen to me. I had a sit-down with Russo tonight, and—”

  “What? Whose idea was that?”

  “His.”

  “Christ, I’m sorry, man. You okay?”

  “Sure. I’m fine.” I stubbed out my half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray beside the bed. “Mick, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  I took a deep breath and blew it out. “You are without question the worst fucking client I’ve ever had. You keep lying to me, you disobey me, you ignore my advice, you’re—you’re accused of murdering your wife…”

  Mick laughed quickly. “I know you can’t just fire me, Brady. And listen. I did not murder Kaye, okay? What do you think I’m doing?”

  “I think you’re panicking. I think you’re afraid and confused and—and completely fucked up, and I wish to hell you’d listen to me.”

  I heard Mick speak to somebody, and then I heard a voice in the background.

  “Brady,” Mick said into the phone, “I only got a minute. I wanted you to know I was okay, that’s all.”

  “Well, good. That’s a relief. I saw your kids yesterday.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “How’re they doing?”

  “They seem like great kids, Mick. They’re—they’re devastated. Kaye, and now you. You should be with them.”

  “Yeah, well I’d be in jail now—or maybe dead—if I wasn’t here, right?”

  “Maybe, but—”

  “I couldn’t stand it, Brady, having my kids look at me thinking I killed their mother. I don’t want them to see me until they know I didn’t do it.”

  “They don’t think you did. But I bet they’d like it if you told them face-to-face. You’ve got to turn yourself in, let me do my job. As long as you’re out there—”

  “Yeah, Russo. I know. I can’t do it, Brady. Not now. Not yet.” He paused. “Hang on,” he said. I heard muffled voices. It sounded like Mick had covered the receiver with his hand to engage in an argument. “Listen,” he said to me a minute later. “I really gotta go. I just want to know that you’re still in my corner.”

  “Of course I am. Even if you are a crappy client.”

  He paused. “I was there,” he said softly.

  “Where?”

  “At my house. That night.”

  “I know that,” I said. “And so do the police. The guy across the street, Mitchell Selvy, he saw you leaning against your car. He told the police. I talked to him. I met your neighbor Darren, too.”

  “Darren, huh? What’d Darren have to say?”

  “He acted strange. When I mentioned Kaye, he got very flustered. Tried to hit me with his spinning rod.”

  “Yeah, that’s Darren,” he murmured. I heard him take a deep breath. “Brady, I went inside. I—I saw Kaye’s body.”

  “Jesus, Mick.”

  “Oh, man…”

  “Mick,” I said, “Listen to me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “My job is to protect you, give you good advice, right?”

  “I’m not gonna turn myself in, Brady. Fuggedaboutit.”

  “I’ve got to tell Horowitz about this conversation, you know.”

  “Sure. Of course you do. Go ahead.”

  I sighed. “Be careful, Mick.”

  “I’m okay.” He hesitated. “If you see Danny and Erin…”

  “I’ll tell them you’re okay.”

  “Tell them I love them, willya?”

  “I w
ill. Of course.”

  “Look,” he said, “I really gotta go. Hey, Brady?”

  “Yes?”

  “Keep an eye on your mail.”

  “What?”

  “See ya, bud.”

  “Mick, wait—”

  But he’d disconnected.

  Thirteen

  I GOT TO THE office before Julie, as I usually do on Monday mornings. I turned on Mr. Coffee and the other important office machines, poured a mug for myself, took it to my desk, and tracked down Horowitz at the State Police barracks at Leverett Circle.

  “I was actually gonna call you,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “The ME’s all done, and Katherine Fallon’s body has been released. Figured you should know.”

  “Have her kids been told?”

  “We told them first. They’re next of kin. You’re just a law­yer.”

  “What’d the autopsy show?”

  “Blow to the head was lethal. All the carving, that was just for fun. She would’ve died anyway.”

  “What about physical evidence? Any fingerprints?”

  Horowitz sighed. “So far, nothing helpful.” He paused. “Lis­ten. You called me. So what did you want?”

  “I left you a message yesterday.”

  “About the two guys in Lexington? The neighbors? Got it. Already thought of it. But thank you. Good to know you’re trying to be cooperative. That it? You called to see if I got your message?”

  “No,” I said. “I called to tell you Mick’s alive. He called me last night.”

  Horowitz was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Figures.”

  I told Horowitz that I had no idea where Mick had called from and that I’d tried to convince him to turn himself in, but he’d refused. “There’s more,” I said. I told Horowitz about my encounter with Vincent Russo. I told him everything, including how Russo had implied threats to Danny and Erin, and how he might’ve had a pretty good motive to murder Kaye.

  “Interesting,” mumbled Horowitz.

  “You think Russo killed Kaye?”

  “Hell, no. That’s dumb. Fallon killed his wife, regardless of what he’s telling you. Interesting that Russo’s using you.”