Muscle Memory

by William G. Tapply

  After I finished eating, I went inside, stacked the dishes in the sink, retrieved the phone, and dialed the Ritz. I asked to be con­nected to Sylvie’s room.

  Instead of ringing me through, the receptionist said, “One moment, sir.”

  A minute later, she said, “I’m sorry, sir. Ms. Szabo checked out this morning.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “She was supposed to be there until Sunday.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure.”

  “Did she leave a forwarding address? Did she switch hotels or something?”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “Me? I’m Brady Coyne. A friend of Ms. Szabo’s.”

  “Yes, sir. One moment, please.” A moment later, she said, “Mr. Coyne?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “I have a message here for you from Ms. Szabo.”

  “Why don’t you read it to me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The receptionist cleared her throat. “All right, sir. It says: ‘Dear, dear Brady. I am so sorry. I have finished my business in Boston, and I cannot continue to deceive you. I have decided to return to New York, to my husband. I do not know if I will remain with him or not, but I know I must decide. Until then, it is better for us both if we do not see each other. I have more fun with you, my dearest oldest friend, than anybody. You are tempting for me. You make it hard for me to make good decisions. So it is better this way.’” The receptionist paused and gave a little cough. “She signs it, ‘Your Sylvie, who will love you forever.’”

  I sat there with the phone pressed against my ear, and after a minute, the receptionist said, “Mr. Coyne? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m here. Did she say ‘husband’?”

  “Um, yes sir. I’m afraid so.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know she was married, you see.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said.

  I beat Julie to the office the next morning, and by the time she arrived I had the coffee brewed. I delivered a mugful to her, hitched my butt up on the corner of her desk, and recounted the events of the previous day. “I’m heading out to Emerson Hospital this afternoon,” I concluded. “I’ve got to clear up some loose ends with Mick.”

  Julie nodded. “He isn’t out of the woods yet, right?”

  “Right.” I wrote the words Vincent Russo on a piece of paper and put it in front of her. “I need to talk to him.”

  Julie’s eyes widened. “You want to talk to him directly?”

  “Yes. No flunkies, no intermediaries, no lawyers or account­ants or—or right-hand men, or whatever they call them. Who­ever you get ahold of, tell them that.”

  “Consigliere,” said Julie.

  “Huh?”

  “The right-hand man. That’s what they call him.”

  “Right,” I said. “Robert Duvall.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You want Marlon Brando. The godfather himself. Not Robert Duvall.”

  I went into my office, found Mick Fallon’s divorce file, and spent half an hour refreshing my memory. Then I put it aside and started to work my way through the stack of papers Julie had left for me. It was the price I always paid for being away from my desk for a day.

  Sometime in the middle of the morning my phone rang. I picked it up, and Julie said, “It took some doing, but I have Mr. Russo on line two.”

  “Good work, kid.”

  “It was actually rather disappointing,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “When I gave that consigliere your name, he didn’t even say no.”

  I pressed the button for line two and said, “Mr. Russo?”

  “Mr. Coyne,” he said. “So maybe we oughta talk, huh?”

  I got to Emerson Hospital in the middle of the afternoon.

  The receptionist told me Mick had been transferred out of intensive care, and I tracked him down to a private room on the second floor of the orthopedic wing. Danny and Erin had pulled up chairs beside his bed. When I stepped into the room, Erin was holding Mick’s hand in both of hers. All three of them were crying.

  I shook hands with Danny and hugged Erin, who turned to her brother and said, “Come on. Let’s get something to eat. They’ve got stuff to talk about.”

  After the kids left, I took the chair beside Mick’s bed.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like I just spent forty-eight minutes trying to keep Kareem away from the boards. Doctor says that’s a good sign.”

  “Doctors are noted for their wit,” I said.

  “We were talking about Kaye,” he said. “Me and the kids.”

  I nodded.

  “This is gonna be hard, man.”

  “It’ll take time, Mick.”

  His eyes welled up. “I can’t tell you how great it feels, having my kids around, knowing they don’t think…” He wiped his wrist across his eyes and tried to smile.

  I squeezed his shoulder. “Has Horowitz been here yet?”

  He nodded. “Him and that pretty partner of his. Brought their trusty tape recorder. I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothin’ but the fucking truth.”

  “For a change,” I said.

  “I told a bunch of lies before, I know,” he said. “To you, to everybody. Myself, even. Been doing that for years, I guess. It got to be a habit, lying. Like a reflex.” He grinned quickly. “Muscle memory, you know?”

  “Mick,” I said, “when did you know about Kaye and Lyn?”

  Mick frowned at me. “What are you saying?”

  “Didn’t Horowitz tell you?”

  Mick stared up at the ceiling. Finally he said softly, “He didn’t tell me anything. But some of his questions…” He looked at me. “Lyn? My best friend? Sonofabitch.”

  “It was Kaye, too,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Yeah. Right.” He let out a long breath. “Do Danny and Erin know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t want them to know.”

  “They’ve got to know, Mick. They know Ned killed her, and sooner or later they’re going to want to know why.”

  Mick stared at me for a minute, then nodded. “Sure. You’re right. I gotta tell them.”

  “So why’d you go to the Conleys’ house yesterday,” I said, “if it wasn’t to confront Lyn?”

  Mick looked at me and smiled. “I just wanted to see my kids, Brady. Simple as that. Hell, I called the state police from my car phone, told them to tell Horowitz I’d be there. That’s why I slugged you, man. I had to see my kids before they locked me up.”

  “But you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “They weren’t going to lock you up.”

  “They had a warrant out for me,” he said. “That Horowitz, he would’ve arrested me, all right. Anyway, I—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “If you didn’t know anything, how did you glom onto Ned?”

  Mick shook his head. “I’m just walking up their driveway when Ned comes barreling out from the house. He sees me and he stops short like he’s seen his worst nightmare. I started to smile at him. Hell, I had no idea what was going on. And then Ned looks me right in the eye and he says, ‘It was me. I did it. I killed her. I’m sorry, Uncle Mick. I loved her. I’m really sorry.’ And I see that he’s crying, tears streaming down his face, Brady, and I just wanted to give the kid a hug. I took a step toward him, and suddenly he gives me a little fake-left-go-right and zips around me. He jumps into the car and starts it up, so I grab onto the door, and…” Mick shrugged.

  “I know the rest,” I said.

  He tried to smile. “What a mess, huh?”

  “It’s all over now.”

  He shook his head. “It won’t be over for a long time. It’ll never be over, far as I’m concerned.”

  I nodded. We sat in silence for a minute, then I said, “I had a conversation with Vincent Russo this morning.”

  Mick closed his eyes. “
Shit,” he mumbled. “I been trying to forget him.”

  “That’s just another form of lying to yourself, Mick. Russo’s not going to disappear just because you got a broken leg, you know.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. “So what’m I gonna do about him?”

  “Pay him off.”

  “Huh? I can’t—”

  “Russo bought your debt from your pal in East Providence. Jimmy Capezza. He paid eighty thousand dollars for it.”

  “Christ, I owed Cappy over three-hundred grand.”

  “Right. Three-hundred-and-twenty, to be exact. Russo’ll accept eighty thousand now and another eighty a year from now and call it even.”

  “How the hell did you—?”

  “Russo fancies himself a businessman, Mick. He made an investment, and he understands about cutting his losses. He and I talked this morning, came to an agreement. I looked over all the stuff you prepared for your divorce. You can do it. Sell that rental property, maybe. The way I figure it, you can get Russo off your back and still have enough to keep food on your table and Erin and Danny in school.”

  Mick’s hand snaked out from under the sheet and grabbed my wrist. “Thanks, bud.”

  “This’ll only work if you quit gambling.”

  “I learned my lesson, man.”

  “I sure hope so,” I said. “Have you—?”

  “I know. Already decided. I’ve gotta get help.”

  I sat there talking with Mick until Danny and Erin returned. Erin told me she planned to stick around, help Mick get back on his feet. Mick had convinced Danny to return to his job at the hotel on Block Island. He was leaving in a couple of days.

  After a few minutes, I glanced at my watch, stood up, said good-bye to what was left of the Fallon family, and left.

  I found a directory out in the reception area, and five minutes later I was knocking on the door marked Administrative Services—Assistant Director.

  A voice called, “It’s open. Come on in.”

  I went in.

  Evie Banyon had risen from behind her desk. When she saw me, she smiled and came around, holding out her hand. I’d forgotten how tall she was.

  I took her hand. “I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “I know,” she said. Her silvery eyes crinkled, and she continued to hold onto my hand. “How’s Mr. Fallon doing today?”

  “Do you know everything?”

  “It’s my job,” she said. She showed no inclination to let go of my hand. In fact, she gave it a little squeeze when she smiled at me.

  “And you’re very good at your job.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “since I was in the neighborhood, I was wondering…”

  “Dinner?” she said.

  “You do know everything,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” I glanced down at the floor for a moment, then looked up at her. I held out my other hand, and she took it, too. “Actually,” I said, “I was wondering how you felt about beer out of bottles, cheeseburgers on the charcoal grill, catsup dribbling down your chin. T-shirts, shorts, and bare feet, salt air on your face, seagulls perching on the balcony rail, a view of the harbor towards sunset, Miles Davis on the stereo inside, the gong of my old bell buoy echoing out there in the fog…”

  Evie Banyon was smiling. “Absolutely perfect,” she said.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries

  A lawyer’s job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people’s closets.

  —SOL STEIN

  “How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh.

  “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

  “It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

  —A. A. MILNE, Winnie-the-Pooh

  One

  JUNE BUGS AND FIREFLIES were flitting around in the walled-in garden behind our townhouse on Beacon Hill. Overhead, an almost-full moon and a skyful of stars lit up the Boston evening. Now and then a myopic moth would alight on the screen of our little portable TV, which was sitting on our picnic table.

  Evie and I were slouching side by side in our comfortable wooden Adirondack chairs with sweaty bottles of Sam Adams in our hands, as we often did on a pleasant June evening when the Red Sox were playing. Henry David Thoreau sprawled on the bricks beside us, his legs occasionally twitching with dog dreams. Baseball put Henry to sleep. From our backyard we imagined that we’d heard the roar of the Fenway crowd all the way from Kenmore Square when David Ortiz hit one over the bullpen in the third inning.

  At the end of the sixth inning, Evie yawned, stood up, stretched, and said she was exhausted. She kissed the back of my neck and stumbled into the house and up to bed. Evie enjoyed baseball. She liked the geometric symmetry of it and the occasional remarkable feat of athleticism, but she wasn’t really a fan. She didn’t care enough about who won, and she didn’t understand the passionate neuroses of lifelong Red Sox addicts such as I, who had seen the home team squander so many late-inning leads over the years that we were never comfortable until after the final out. We knew there was always a Bucky Dent or a Bill Buckner lurking around the corner, waiting to break our hearts. The aberration of 2004 would never ease our apprehensions.

  “It’s only a game,” Evie would point out while I clenched my fists on every pitch. “And besides, they play about two billion of them a year.”

  “It’s not only a game,” I would say. “It’s life in a nutshell.”

  One inning and half a bottle of beer later the Sox were clinging to an uncomfortable 9-6 lead. The Orioles had runners on first and third with only one out when the phone rang.

  We’d brought the portable kitchen phone outside with us, so I was able to grab it on the first ring, before the one beside our bed disturbed Evie, I hoped.

  When I answered, a voice I didn’t recognize said, “Mr. Coyne?”

  “Yes,” I said, “this is Brady Coyne, and it’s almost eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night. You better not be trying to sell me something.”

  Henry, hearing the tone of my voice, sat up, yawned, and arched his eyebrows at me. I reached over and scratched his forehead.

  “This is Robert Lancaster,” said the guy on the phone. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m here with my father. Dalton Lancaster.”

  “We met once,” I said. “You were about eight. Your parents were in the middle of a divorce. You and your dad and I had lunch together.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “That was about twelve years ago.”

  I waited, and when he didn’t continue, I said, “So where’s ‘here’?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said you were there with him.”

  “Oh. The emergency room at the New England Medical Center.”

  “Who’s hurt?” I said. “You or Dad?”

  “Him. My father.”

  “Is he okay?” I said.

  “They say he’s going to be all right. He wants to talk to you.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He got beat up.”

  “Who—?”

  “I don’t know. Three guys. He says he doesn’t know who they were.”

  “Well, okay,” I said, “put him on.”

  “He’s wondering if you’d be able to meet with him.”

  “Sure. We can set something up.”

  “No,” he said. “He means now.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Whatever happened to your father, client or no client, it’s late and I’m tired and I intend to watch the rest of the ball game and then crawl into bed with my girlfriend, who’s waiting upstairs for me. Just put him on the phone and we’ll set up an appointment.”

  “Thing is,” said Robert Lancaster, “they jumped him in the parking lot, kicked him in the face,
loosened a couple teeth, cut his tongue, banged up some ribs, and he can’t talk very well. He’s pretty scared, and he says he needs your help.”

  “They kicked him?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “A mugging, huh? They robbed him?”

  “I don’t know. He says they didn’t take anything.”

  “Just kicked him.”

  “I guess so,” said Robert Lancaster.

  “Did he call the police?”

  “No.”

  “Tell him to report it to the police,” I said. “That’s what he needs to do.”

  He blew a quick breath into the phone. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? He called me. I said, ‘Why are you calling me? You never call me.’ He said, ‘I got a problem, and I need you to come over here.’ I said, ‘What about all those times I had a problem? Did you come over?’” He paused. “Anyway, he called, I went. Now I’m here and I’m calling you.”

  “You’re the one he called,” I said. “You being his only son.”

  “Me being convenient,” said Robert. “I live in Brighton. I go to BU. I took the T over. Look. He’s hurt pretty bad, Mr. Coyne.”

  “So I should come right away, too,” I said. “Since I’m his lawyer as well as his friend.”

  “That’s the message. If you can’t do it, I’ll tell him.”

  I blew out a breath. “Yes. Okay. He’s my client. That’s what I do. When are they releasing him?”

  “In a few minutes, I’d say. They’ve patched him up, given him a prescription. He’s finishing up some paperwork.”

  I thought for a minute. “There’s a little bar-and-grill on Tremont Street, place called Vic’s, stays open late for the after-theater folks, five minutes from where you are. Know where it is?”

  “We’ll find it,” he said.

  “Just around the corner from Boylston,” I said. “I’ll meet you guys there in fifteen or twenty minutes. You get there first, grab a booth and order me a cup of coffee.”

  “You got it,” said Robert Lancaster.

  I clicked off the phone, verified that the Sox had not blown their lead, turned off the TV, and took the phone and the TV into the house. Henry followed behind me.

  I went up to our bedroom and opened the door. In the dim light from the hallway I saw Evie mounded under the covers. She was lying on her side facing away from the doorway. The curve of her hip made me smile.