by Jon Loomis
“Thanks, Dr. Phil,” Lola said, giving Coffin a sideways glance as they crossed Route 6. “What about the power of love, baby? Haven’t you ever known anybody like that—that could make you do stuff against your better judgment?”
Coffin laughed, rolled down the window, and lit a cigarette. “Well,” he said, “there’s my uncle Rudy, but that’s not quite the same thing. I guess you could say my ex-wife brought out the worst in me for a while, although it was bubbling pretty close to the surface toward the end of our marriage.”
Lola waved at the cigarette smoke swirling inside the Crown Vic. “That’s all I’m saying. Some people just know how to push your buttons. They like a little conflict—a little drama.”
“Plus, if they can implicate you, that gives them power,” Coffin said. “Once you’ve compromised your marriage, there’s always the implied threat that they’ll expose you.”
Lola nodded. “Unless you do what they want. It’s a pretty fucked-up dynamic.”
“Been there, done that?”
Lola narrowed her eyes and glanced at Coffin. “Kind of,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Coffin said. “Don’t go all strong and silent on me. Let’s share.”
Lola snorted. “I live for your amusement.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll tell the story and you stop me if I get too far off track.” He rubbed his chin. “Where do we start? It was in college—”
“Law school.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. You were in law school, and you had a steady thing going with a nice girl named Becky—”
“Becky?”
“Okay, not Becky. So, not Becky is all about cuddling in front of the fireplace and tea and nice little cookies—”
“Annie. Her name was Annie.”
“But something was missing,” Coffin said. “The erotic spark. She was too nice. Too sweet—like she was afraid of herself, almost.”
Lola stopped at the light on Bradford and clicked on the turn signal. “This is creeping me out a little,” she said.
“Not really what you’d want in the old sackeroo,” Coffin said.
“The old sackeroo?” Lola said, turning into the parking lot across from Town Hall. “Did we just leap back in time to, like, 1948?”
“You know what I mean,” Coffin said. “I’m right, right?”
“We’ll see,” Lola said. “Keep going.”
Coffin cleared his throat. “So this girl walks up to you one day after class and asks you out. Just like that. She’s not as pretty as Annie, but she’s hot in this way you can’t quite put your finger on.”
“She’s stacked,” Lola said, elbowing Coffin in the ribs.
He shot her a look. “Look, if you’re going to sit there and make adolescent jokes—”
“Sorry,” Lola said.
“She’s a Brooklyn hipster chick,” Coffin said. “She’s got a couple of ironic tattoos and a spiky hairdo and a clit ring.”
“Northampton,” Lola said. “She’s from Northampton.”
“She’s totally out, too,” Coffin said. “Which is sexy all by itself.”
“That part’s actually true,” Lola said. “She wasn’t afraid to take a chance that she might be wrong about me. I mean, do I look like a lesbian?”
“No fair,” Coffin said, pushing the door open and climbing out.
“Trick question. Let’s walk over to the Portuguese Bakery and get some doughnuts.”
Lola grinned, climbed out of the Crown Vic, and put her hat on. “So you’re saying I do. You think I look like a lesbian.”
“Now you’re harassing me,” Coffin said.
“Go on with the story,” Lola said. “It was just getting good.”
“Okay, fine. So you go out for a coffee—you know, no big deal—and the next thing you know you’re at her place, having sex on the couch.”
“Hot lesbian sex,” Lola said, as they crossed Commercial Street.
“Fucking,” Coffin said. “In the best possible sense of the word. Abandon. Nothing off-limits. No earnest discussions about the gender politics of the dildo. That was Becky.” Inside, the bakery smelled like grease and sugar and coffee.
“Annie,” Lola said.
“But this is what’s-her-name,” Coffin said. “Agnes.”
“Jen,” Lola said. “Having fun?”
“I told you—I live through you vicariously,” Coffin said. He pointed at a platter full of flat, sugary, fried-dough confections inside the glass counter. “Duas malasadas, por favor,” he said to the man behind the counter. “How are you, Ernie?”
The counterman shrugged. He was a little older than Coffin, with a thick black mustache that might have been dyed. He wore a white apron, white pants, and a white paper hat. “I could moan an’ groan,” he said, “but who the hell would listen? How’s your ma, Frankie?”
“Not bad, considering,” Coffin said. “Some good days, some not so good.”
“Same for everybody, ha?” Ernie said, reaching into the display case with a slip of wax paper. “Some days good, some days not so good.” He picked out six of the Portuguese doughnuts and pushed them into a white paper bag. “A couple for your cousin Tony, too. He’s lookin’ a little skinny lately. What can I get for the young lady?”
Lola peered into the big glass counter full of cookies and pastries and cakes. “Uh, just coffee,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Coffee for me, too,” Coffin said.
The counterman poured coffee into foam cups. Coffin sipped his—it was bitter and scorched, as though it had been sitting on the hot plate a long time.
“On the house, Frankie,” Ernie said. “Give your old ma my best regards.”
Coffin sat at his desk eating a malasada and sipping bitter coffee, which he’d doctored heavily with cream and sugar. The block walls were painted Di-Gel green and glowed sickly in the buzzing fluorescent light.
“There was more to it than just the sex thing, though,” he said, tipping back in the orange plastic guest chair, propping his shoulders against the file cabinet. “Agnes was smart and funny and kind of mean about people, in a way that drew you in. She saw right through you; it was like she could read your weaknesses and all your dark, ulterior motives before you even opened your mouth. She had you pegged within twenty minutes—and she knew how to use all of it against you.”
“Do you think of me as having dark, ulterior motives?” Lola said, twirling her uniform hat on her index finger.
“That’s neither here nor there,” Coffin said, pushing the last bite of greasy, sugary doughnut into his mouth. “How did the Lola-Agnes-Becky love triangle resolve itself? Was there a huge, ugly scene?”
“You tell me.”
“Okay,” Coffin said, sipping the scalded coffee. “Let’s see.” He ran a hand through his hair, feeling for the dime-sized bald spot on the crown of his head with a fingertip. “You fessed up after a few weeks. It sucked. Becky took it hard.”
Lola raised her eyebrows, nodded. “There was weeping.”
“Copious weeping,” Coffin said. “Like you’d chopped up her cat with a chain saw or something. You were the worst person on the planet.”
“I never liked that cat,” Lola said. “She was a neurotic little barfer.”
Coffin scribbled something on a slip of paper. “And the cat’s name was?” he said, folding the paper in half.
“Emily,” Lola said. “After Emily Dickinson, of course.”
“Ha,” Coffin said. He stood up, unfolded the scrap of paper and handed it to Lola. The word “Emily” was scrawled across it.
“Okay,” Lola said. “You’re definitely creeping me out. Are you done yet?”
Coffin sat back down in the squeaky office chair, put his feet up on the desk. “So you try to make a go of it with Agnes. The first few weeks are kind of great—intense and guilt-soaked, but the sex is better than ever. You move in together. Then, out of the blue, she decides she wants to date other people. She kind of misses men, she says. Someday she mig
ht want to have a baby, she says.”
“Seriously,” Lola said. “Let’s stop.”
Coffin stopped. “Sorry,” he said. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “Seriously. I didn’t mean to cross a line there.”
“It’s not that,” Lola said.
“Good.”
“It’s just hard to talk about. Things with Jen got really codependent and freaky for a while. I tried to move out once, and she literally lay down in the driveway behind my car as I was about to back out. I kind of started to hate her.”
“But you were locked in.”
“Right—when you ditch somebody for a new relationship, your impulse is to make the new thing work, no matter what. Otherwise you look like a fool.”
“Been there,” Coffin said. “Done that.”
Lola twirled her uniform hat meditatively. “So Jen and I are up in New Hampshire at her aunt’s lake house, out in the middle of nowhere. It’s this amazing, serene place, mist rising off the lake in the moonlight, loons calling—totally beautiful, nobody around. With anybody else on the planet, I’d be having a great time.”
“Sarah Palin?” Coffin said, pulling a stapled report from his inbox and leafing through it.
“Ew,” Lola said. “Thanks for that thought, Frank.”
“Sorry.”
“But I’m not having a great time with Jen. She’s in full-on freaky mode—one minute she wants to go skinny-dipping and have sex on the dock, next minute she’s picking a huge fight with me about how to stack the firewood.”
“The firewood?” Coffin said, looking up.
“Right, and every other damn thing. What to have for lunch, the most environmentally sound dishwashing method, you name it.”
“Not fun.”
“No, and I’m stuck there. We only brought one vehicle, and I can’t just ditch her.”
“Ack,” Coffin said.
Lola leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk. “I wanted to kill her.”
Coffin waved a hand. “If you’ve never wanted to kill someone, there’s probably something wrong with you.”
“No. Seriously. The thought of cracking her over the head with a canoe paddle or drowning her skinny ass in the lake was pleasurable. Homicidal ideation, Frank. I actually had to consciously stop myself from thinking about it.”
“So, how close was it?”
“Close. A couple of times.”
Coffin grinned. “Kind of hard to go back to walks in the rain and candlelit hot tubs after a moment like that.”
“Yeah, that trip was pretty much the end of the romance—what was left of it.”
Coffin leaned back and laced his fingers on top of his head.
“What?” Lola said. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Did you ever tell her?” Coffin said.
“That she almost ended up at the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee, you mean?”
He nodded.
“No. Are you kidding me? I’d have never heard the end of it. Then I would have had to kill her.”
Coffin held up the report. “Final autopsy on Kenji Sole.”
“Holy shit—you just let me keep talking?”
“Three deep stab wounds to the chest including the one that killed her, two to the abdomen,” Coffin read. “One shallower wound to the back, apparently struck a rib. Three defensive wounds: two on the left forearm, one on the right. So she was stabbed nine times altogether. All wounds appear to have been caused by the same knife.”
“The one sticking out of her chest,” Lola said, looking over Coffin’s shoulder.
“Bingo. The depth of the wounds indicates the killer was angry—”
“Duh.”
“And reasonably strong. Also, entry angles of some wounds indicate the perpetrator may have been taller than the victim, or standing above the victim.”
“She was what, five foot six?”
Coffin flipped back to the first page. “And a half,” he said.
“So an angry killer, taller than the victim, reasonably strong. What does that tell us?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know,” Coffin said.
“No mutilation,” Lola said.
“No wounds to the genitals. No sign that she was tortured.”
Coffin turned a page. “No cuts to the throat. No sign that she was bound.”
“None of the hallmarks of a sexual psychotic killer, in other words. Or of an execution.” Lola tapped the report with a fingertip. “The last wound was the one that killed her—punctured the left ventricle. Death almost instantaneous.”
“An important detail,” Coffin said. “The killer was enraged enough to kill but not crazy enough to keep going after Kenji stopped struggling.”
“The wound in the back is interesting,” Lola said. “Was she stabbed in the back first? Or did she turn and try to escape?”
“If the first wound is to the back, then maybe the killer was concealed and jumped out,” Coffin said. “A sneak attack.”
“Hiding in the kitchen, maybe,” Lola said. “Makes sense. Then is it a jealousy thing? The killer’s in the kitchen, Kenji’s in the living room with a boyfriend—”
“On top, apparently.”
“Or behind,” Coffin said.
“Right,” Lola said, cheeks turning a faint pink. “Almost forgot.”
“The killer grabs a knife, runs into the living room, stabs her in the back—”
“But the blow hits a rib, doesn’t do much damage.”
“Hurts like a sonofabitch, though. Definitely gets her attention. Kenji jumps up, and the killer keeps stabbing her as she’s trying to back away.”
“One question,” Lola said.
Coffin held up a finger. “What’s the boyfriend doing while Jealous Person is stabbing the woman he’s been having sex with until, like, a second ago?”
“Right. Does he run away? Stand there and watch it happen?”
“What, naked? And wait for the killer to turn on him?”
“So he runs away—but doesn’t call the police. Why not?”
“He’s married. Wants to stay that way.”
“Or wants to protect the killer,” Lola said.
Coffin rubbed his chin. Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
“So, let’s say the wound to the back isn’t from the first blow,” Coffin said finally. “Then what?”
“Depends,” Lola said. “On what CSS comes up with. If there’s no blood in the kitchen—”
“Then it’s a lot less clear,” Coffin said. “If there is blood in the kitchen, some spatter, at least, it could be that the argument starts there. They’ve just had sex, say—”
“He’s ejaculated inside her.”
“Or someone else did, an hour or two prior.”
Lola sat down in the orange plastic desk chair across from Coffin’s desk. “I’m getting a headache,” she said, rubbing her face with both hands. “Too many ors.”
“They’ve just had sex, they’re fighting about something, he or she grabs a knife and stabs Kenji in the belly—or she blocks the blow with her arm. Kenji runs to the living room, starting to bleed like hell. More stabbing, not much struggle, the end. Killer tosses the place and leaves.”
“Shit,” Lola said. “I forgot about the tossing part, almost.”
“Or,” Coffin said, “they’re in the living room postsex. They’re having a fight. He’s in a rage, he’s looking around for a weapon—”
“He says, ‘Hold on a sec—stay right there, I’ll be back in two shakes with a big-ass knife.’”
“Trots out to the kitchen, grabs big-ass knife, trots back into the living room—”
“Still in a murderous rage, stabs her in the chest, et cetera.”
“Doesn’t make sense that way, really,” Coffin said. “You’d use whatever weapon was at hand, probably, if you were that angry. The fireplace poker, or a statuette or something. Or your bare hands. You wouldn’t run to the kitchen, grab a knife, and come bac
k. Too much time to think things over. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Lola said. “What about the tossing part, though? If it’s a jealousy thing, or they’re having a lovers’ quarrel, it doesn’t make any sense either. You have a fight or catch her with another man—”
“Or your husband. Or—”
“Or whoever,” Lola said. “Then, as an afterthought, you decide there’s a computer and who knows what else you really, really need to look for?”
“Now I’m getting a headache,” Coffin said. A drop of condensation fell from the sewer pipe and splattered on the autopsy report. He wiped it off with his sleeve.
Lola shook her head. “This whole thing really bugs me,” she said. “As a woman, I mean.”
Coffin slid the autopsy report into a manila folder, then put the folder into his desk drawer. “It’s hard not to judge her,” he said.
“You want to say that a woman should be able to have as many partners as she wants,” Lola said, picking a speck of lint from her uniform. “Whenever and wherever she wants, without having to worry about getting killed.” She looked up at Coffin. Her eyes were very blue. “It ought to work that way.”
Coffin nodded. “It ought to,” he said, “but ought to’s got nothing to do with it.” He picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Who are we calling?” Lola said.
“Nick Stavros. His office.” He held up a finger. “Hi, Marcy, this is Frank Coffin. Is he in? Out of town till when? Have him call me, yeah. It’s important. Thanks.” He put the receiver back in its cradle.
“You know Stavros’s office number? Just off the top of your head?”
“I’ve known Stavros since I was a kid,” Coffin said. “Hell, we’re lodge brothers.”
“Lodge brothers? You’re in a lodge?”
Coffin nodded. “Masons.”
“You’re a Mason? Jesus, Frank. You’re a man of mystery.”
“King Hiram’s Lodge, baby. Chartered in 1795 by Paul freaking Revere. I joined when I came back home from Baltimore. Rudy brought me in. It was a way of reentering the community, I guess. I haven’t been to a meeting in a long time, though.” Coffin looked at his watch. “Ever tried the Alden for lunch?” he said.
Lola frowned. “Following up on Carswell?”