Mating Season

by Jon Loomis

  The office door flew open. A young woman in what appeared to be a black wedding dress sailed into Boyle’s office. She held a tall paperboard coffee cup in one hand. A green monkey sat on her shoulder, nibbling a biscotto. She extended her free hand to Coffin, palm down, as though she expected him to kiss it. It was encased in a black lace glove that ended just below her armpit. “Priestess Maiya,” she said. “You must be Inspector Coffin.”

  “He’s a detective, dear,” J. Hedrick Sole said. “Not an inspector.”

  “Whatever,” said Priestess Maiya. “Your fly’s open.”

  The monkey stared at Coffin. Its eyes bulged. J. Hedrick Sole’s eyes bulged. Outside, the rain fell harder.

  Downstairs in Coffin’s basement office, a small drop of fluid dangled from the overhead sewer pipe for a moment, then plunked softly onto the desk.

  “Good God,” said Priestess Maiya, looking up at the sewer pipe, then down at Coffin’s desktop. “What was that?” She sat in Coffin’s orange plastic guest chair while J. Hedrick Sole waited in the hallway.

  “Condensation,” Coffin said. “I think.”

  “You hope,” said Priestess Maiya. Gracie the monkey perched on her shoulder, regarding Coffin with wide, astonished eyes.

  Coffin opened his desk drawer and took out a felt-tipped pen and a legal pad. “Can I ask what your real name is, just for our records?”

  “My legal name is Priestess Maiya. I changed it four years ago.”

  “Changed it from what?” Coffin said.

  “McGurk. Ruth McGurk.”

  He looked up from his legal pad.

  “M-C-G-U-R-K,” said Priestess Maiya.

  “So the last time you saw Kenji was around a month ago?”

  “Yes, early April. A Saturday.”

  Coffin opened his desk calendar. “The first Saturday in April was the fifth. The next Saturday was the twelfth.”

  “I was in Amsterdam on the twelfth, I’m pretty sure, so it must have been the fifth. We had lunch at this noodle shop in Chinatown. Vietnamese. Quite good. I had the tripe.”

  “Tripe?”

  “Yes, you know—cow intestine.”

  “Do you remember the name of the noodle shop?”

  “Phó Bo. Little hole-in-the-wall with a dirty floor, just across from New England Medical Center.”

  “Whose decision was it to meet there?”

  “Mine,” said Priestess Maiya. “I’ve been there several times. It has a very special energy—a specific kind of chi. Do you know about chi, Detective?”

  Coffin scratched his ear with his pencil eraser. “Life force, isn’t it?”

  Priestess Maiya smiled and clapped her hands together. “Very good, Detective.”

  “What did you talk about over lunch, the three of you?”

  She leaned forward conspiratorially and put her elbows on Coffin’s desk. Her eyes were almond-shaped and very dark. “Kenji was not a happy person,” she said, “and she didn’t want the people in her life to be happy, either. She was driving her poor father crazy with all this business about the will.” The monkey hopped from her shoulder to the desktop, then skittered onto the pile of papers in Coffin’s in-box and bared its little fangs.

  “Whose will?” said Coffin.

  “Jerry’s will, of course,” said Priestess Maiya, leaning back again and regarding Coffin through narrowed eyes. “But you already knew that. What else do you know that you’re pretending not to know, Detective?”

  “I’ve only heard bits and pieces. It would help if we had the whole story.”

  Priestess Maiya took a silver cigarette case and a long cigarette holder from her purse, screwed a cigarette into the holder, and lit it with a small gold lighter. “I love smoking,” she said, exhaling a thick blue stream, “but I hate having smoked.”

  “About the will,” said Coffin. He pushed the glass ashtray across his desk.

  “Well, Kenji was very upset that Jerry had changed it, you see. She was the principal heir in the previous will—would’ve gotten the lion’s share of his estate, after the various charities and things took their little bites.”

  “Not anymore,” Coffin said.

  “No,” said Priestess Maiya. “Jerry’s a very generous man, and he believes in my work, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Coffin.

  “Not that it matters the least little bit to Priestess Maiya.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and exhaled through her nose. “I’ve always been quite good at raising money to support my work. It’s what Jerry wants, though.”

  “How much money are we talking about, exactly?”

  Priestess Maiya waved a black-gloved hand. “Oh, God. I don’t even know, really. Millions, I suppose.”

  “Ten million?” Coffin asked. “Twenty?”

  “Something like that,” said Priestess Maiya, removing the cigarette from its holder and stubbing it out in the ashtray.

  Coffin tapped a pencil on his notepad. “Kenji had her own money, right? From her grandfather?”

  “Exactly. Great sacks of it. So of course it wasn’t really about the money, Detective.”

  “No?” Coffin said, not liking the way the monkey was squatting in his in-box.

  “Oh, now, don’t be a dull boy, Detective. It was a Daddy thing, of course.”

  “A Daddy-has-a-girlfriend thing?”

  “Precisely. Daddy’s getting laid. Bad Daddy. Classic Electra complex.”

  “So, back to the noodle shop,” Coffin said. “Phó Bo. You said hello, you sat down, you ordered cow intestine.”

  “Then Kenji launched into this tirade, Detective—I’m not exaggerating—this absolute tirade about how she was going to put a stop to it. That’s what she said, ‘put a stop to it.’”

  “Did she say how she planned to go about it?”

  Priestess Maiya rubbed her temples. “God. It was awful. She said she was going to take Jerry to court and have him declared incompetent unless he cut me out of the will.”

  “So what did Jerry say?”

  “Well, Jerry’s entirely competent, and a very proud man. He told her she was welcome to try, but if she did he’d countersue, and of course cut her out of the will entirely. Then it got ugly.”

  “Ugly how?” said Coffin.

  Priestess Maiya batted her long eyelashes. “She accused Priestess Maiya of all sorts of terrible things. You’d think I had her poor father under some sort of spell.” Her face turned serious, her mouth flattening into a tight line. “She made threats, but I didn’t take them seriously.”

  “Threats other than the lawsuit and the competence thing?”

  “Physical threats—against me. She threatened to have my legs broken and, in her words, my tits cut off. What sort of person would say a thing like that, Detective?”

  The monkey made a loud chittering sound and scrambled up Priestess Maiya’s arm. Two small, glistening turds lay in Coffin’s in-box.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Coffin.

  Priestess Maiya tickled the monkey under its chin. “Gracie,” she said. “What a naughty thing to do.”

  The door swung open, and Lola stuck her head in. “Mind if I sit in?” she said.

  Coffin forced himself to stop staring at the monkey turds. “Priestess Maiya, this is my partner, Sergeant Winters.”

  Priestess Maiya smiled and held out a gloved hand. “Charmed,” she said. “Have you ever done any sort of performance work, Sergeant Winters?”

  “Me?” Lola said. “I’m tone-deaf.”

  “I can’t believe that monkey crapped in my in-box,” Coffin said.

  “Hi, monkey,” Lola said, stroking Gracie’s round head with her finger. The monkey closed its enormous eyes and sighed.

  “So,” Coffin said after he’d dumped the two slender monkey turds into the trash can. “How did the conversation end—after Kenji threatened you?”

  “I said I was going to perform a purification ritual for Kenji, to try to cleanse her of all the rage she was feeling. She told me t
o go screw myself. So Priestess Maiya got up and walked out. Jerry came, too.”

  “That’s the last contact you had with Kenji before she died? No other conversations or meetings?”

  “Nothing after that, no. Not directly.”

  “Indirectly?”

  “A letter or two from her lawyers, that was all. Routine inquiries. Jerry passed them on to his staff and that was the end of it. There was really nothing they could do, and they knew it.”

  “When was the last time you were in Provincetown, Priestess Maiya?”

  “Oh, months ago. Last summer—we came out for a visit, Jerry and I.”

  “Not since then?”

  “No.”

  “And if you don’t mind my asking—”

  “Don’t be shy, Detective.”

  “Where were you on Friday night, between eight and midnight, say?”

  “Jerry and I stayed in that night. He wasn’t feeling all that well, and I decided to stay home with him.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Just a bug. Some twenty-four-hour virus, apparently.”

  Coffin tapped his pencil on the edge of the desk, then turned to Lola. “Anything you’d like to ask the priestess?”

  Lola pursed her lips. “What are you a priestess of, exactly?”

  “My vagina is the door to a great and holy temple, Sergeant Winters. So is yours.”

  “Okeydokey,” said Lola, eyebrows raised.

  The monkey bared its little fangs at Coffin. He bared his back.

  “Gee,” said Lola after they’d interviewed J. Hedrick Sole and the old man and his girlfriend had driven away in his chauffeured Bentley. “Think they worked on their stories?” She flipped through Coffin’s notes, comparing them to her own. “They’re almost word for word in places. Put a stop to it. Cut her tits off. Routine inquiries.”

  Coffin pulled on his leather jacket. “Goes without saying. He’s a lawyer.” He paused. “What do you think—is she a suspect?”

  “Well, there’s motive, maybe—Kenji can’t have Daddy declared incompetent if she’s dead—but I’d want to see those letters from Kenji’s lawyers. They both called them ‘routine inquiries.’”

  “Every time I’ve gotten a letter from a lawyer,” Coffin said, as they climbed the stairs to the ground floor, “it’s either been a bill, a threat, or bad news. Never a routine inquiry.”

  “Cavalo said Kenji hired a private detective to dig up the dirt on Priestess Maiya. I wonder what they came up with.”

  “Me, too,” Coffin said. “I’ll bet the PI worked for her lawyers.” He pushed the big front door open. The drizzle had stopped. A small troop of starlings picked their way across the lawn, near the base of the World War I monument. The grass seemed very green in the muted light. “Torkel, Baldritch, Nash, wasn’t it?”

  Lola pulled her notebook from her purse, flipped it open. “That’s what J. Hedrick said, yes. You’ve heard of them, I take it?”

  “Very prominent Boston firm. Highly regarded, nasty in a clinch. Known for high-profile lawsuits and generally dragging their opponents through the mud.”

  “Sole and Priestess Maiya would have to know we’d follow up. Why would they lie about the letters being ‘routine inquiries’?”

  “Maybe he figures we’re too busy, too dumb, or too incompetent,” Coffin said. “Maybe what sounds like a threatening letter to me is routine to a professional litigator like Sole.”

  “Maybe,” Lola said, as they climbed into the big, unmarked Crown Vic, “but I’d still like to see those letters.”

  “I’m more interested in the PI’s report,” Coffin said. “A trip to Boston may be in order.”

  Lola poked him in the ribs with the car keys. “Hoping for pictures, Frank?”

  “I know my rights,” Coffin said. “I’m not saying anything. Hey, I almost forgot—how was your date?”

  Lola turned the key, and the Crown Vic’s big V8 rumbled to life. “Good,” Lola said.

  “Good? That’s it? Good?”

  “Okay, Mr. Nosy,” Lola said. “Better than good. Very good.”

  “Very good,” Coffin said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. How about hot? Would you say it was a hot date?”

  “Sure,” Lola said. “Hot. A hot date. There—happy now?”

  “I can’t believe you’re holding out like this,” Coffin said. “I tell you everything, but I have to pry and pry and all I get is ‘good’?”

  Lola rolled her eyes. “Oh. My. God. You want the play-by-play, is that it? You’re a total voyeur, did you know that? You and Kenji Sole.”

  “What can I say? I live vicariously through you.”

  “We had dinner at my place, a nice bottle of pinot noir. Very low-key.”

  “A minute ago it was a hot date, now it’s low-key.”

  “Jesus. You’re relentless. You want to know if we had sex, right? That’s what this is about.”

  “That’s coming from you. I didn’t say that.”

  “Okay, fine. We had sex. For hours. Hot. Lesbian. Sex. Satisfied?”

  Coffin rolled down the window, lit a cigarette. “Oh yeah,” he said.

  Lola laughed. “J. Hedrick and Priestess Maiya didn’t really drive all the way out here to tell us to work harder, did they?”

  “No,” Coffin said. “It was a preemptive strike. They wanted to get their statements on the record. That way they don’t look like they’re hiding anything.”

  “But if they’re that worried about looking like they’re hiding something, they must be hiding something.”

  Coffin shook his head. “Their whole response is so premeditated,” he said. “Where’s the grief? His daughter was murdered less than twenty-four hours ago, for God’s sake.”

  Lola shrugged. “He’s grieving on the inside, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” Coffin said.

  Lola’s sleek black cell phone was on the console. Coffin flipped it open and checked for a signal. “Two bars,” he said. “I guess the wind’s blowing in the right direction.” He dialed 411. “Boston, Massachusetts,” he said, after a long moment. “Torkel, Baldritch, Nash. T-O-R-K-E-L. It’s a business.”

  Chapter 4

  MacMillan Pier stretched 1,270 feet into Provincetown Harbor and was sixty feet across at its widest point. The concrete deck was supported by hundreds of wooden pilings, each the thickness of a large man’s torso, and with the tide halfway out stood about eight feet above the dark, choppy surface of the water. Still, to Coffin the pier seemed insubstantial; he could almost feel it swaying in the breeze.

  “I hate this fucking guy already,” Coffin said, looking down at Cap’n Rory’s sailboat, the P’town Princess. “Let’s just arrest him and call it a day.”

  Lola tucked a strand of hair back under her uniform hat. “Who is he, again?”

  “Cap’n Rory,” Coffin said. “He was seeing Kenji Sole, but he wasn’t on Cavalo’s list. I heard he was acting weird the morning after she was killed.”

  “So, you want to arrest him for acting weird, or because he lives on a boat?”

  “The second thing,” Coffin said. “I mean, what kind of an asshole lives on a fucking boat?”

  As bad as the pier was, the rickety aluminum gangway down to the deck of Cap’n Rory’s boat was infinitely worse. Coffin’s stomach lurched; he gripped the gangway’s flimsy rope rail with both hands.

  “You okay, Frank?” Lola said, descending a few feet ahead of Coffin.

  “Fine,” Coffin said, trying not to look down. “Just perfect. Do you have to bounce like that?”

  “Jeez. Sorry.”

  “Stop laughing. It’s not funny.”

  “It’s really hard to stop laughing when somebody tells you to stop laughing,” Lola said.

  “Fine,” Coffin said, “but it’ll be your fault if I barf.”

  Cap’n Rory didn’t look like much, Coffin thought. He was fiftyish, short, balding, and bandy-legged. He wore swimming trunks and a Hawaiian shirt even though the day was still wind
y and raw. The trunks were orange and stained on the right leg with something that looked like lime Popsicle.

  “The last time I saw Kenji was over a month ago,” Cap’n Rory said. He sat in a deck chair on board the P’town Princess, smoking a long, fat cigar. “She dumped me. Said she needed to cull the herd.” His voice was gravelly. The sound of it made Coffin reflexively clear his throat.

  “Cull the herd?”

  “Yeah, you know—reduce the inventory. She had too many boyfriends. She could only keep track of so many at a time. She’d add a couple of new ones and lose one or two that she wasn’t really into anymore. It was like a collection she was always tweaking, know what I mean?”

  “How did that make you feel?” Lola said. “Getting dumped like that.”

  Cap’n Rory shrugged. “No big deal,” he said. “Kenji was a hot broad and all, but I get more pussy than I know what to do with. No offense, Officer.”

  “You do?” Coffin said.

  “It’s the boat,” Cap’n Rory said. “Seventy-three feet of chick magnet. Young, old, skinny, fat—they can’t resist it.”

  “Really?” Coffin said, squirming in his deck chair.

  “I shit you not, my friend,” Cap’n Rory said. “It’s the romance of the frickin’ sea. No joke.”

  The P’town Princess bobbed gently against her tether. Coffin closed his eyes. He could feel a sheen of sweat, slick on his forehead.

  “So you were aware that Kenji had other boyfriends,” Lola said.

  Cap’n Rory nodded, eyebrows raised. “Oh, fuck yeah. If you were human and had a dick, you had a shot with Kenji. But mostly she liked rich, handsome guys. Go figure.”

  Coffin tilted his head. “So you’re saying that when Kenji ditched you for, like, six other guys, that didn’t piss you off even a little?”

  Cap’n Rory puffed at his cigar, then held it out at arm’s length. “See that?”

  “Dr. Freud would be envious,” Coffin said.

  “Cuban,” Cap’n Rory said. “It’s an El Presidente—same exact cigar Castro used to smoke. Maybe the best cigar on the planet. Kenji gave me a box of ’em the night she dumped me. Then she fucked my brains out. How pissed off could you be?” He shrugged again. “Kenji may have been a bitch, but she was a classy bitch.”