Mating Season

by Jon Loomis

  “Daddy been bad,” said little Ronnie, still staring at the TV.

  “So after little Ronnie was born, things changed between you and your husband?” Lola asked.

  Mrs. Ramos nodded her head. She looked like a sad bear in a housecoat. “I started noticing some stuff. Like the way he looked at other women, you know? It seemed different. Like there was purpose to it—not just curiosity. Then I guess one of them looked back and liked what she saw.”

  “Kenji Sole.”

  “Yeah,” Mrs. Ramos said, lower lip trembling. She dabbed at her eyes again.

  “Me hateses Daddy,” little Ronnie said. On the TV, Bob the Builder and a talking steamroller were fixing a hole in a sidewalk.

  “You shouldn’t say that, honey,” Mrs. Ramos said.

  “Daddy been bad,” little Ronnie said.

  “This is a hard question for me to ask,” Lola said, looking down at her notebook, “but where was your husband on Friday night, Mrs. Ramos?”

  “Here with me and the kids,” Mrs. Ramos said. “For a change. He came right home from work and never left the house.”

  “For a change? That was unusual for him?”

  “Yup. Especially on a Friday night. Usually he’d go out and have some beers at the Old Colony. You know, unwind a little.”

  “So why not this Friday?” Lola said.

  Mrs. Ramos shrugged her thick shoulders. “I don’t know. He said he was tired and felt like staying home. I was happy about it. I made his favorite dinner.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Steak and french fries,” Mrs. Ramos said. “Eddie’s a red meat kind of guy.”

  “Me likes french fries,” little Ronnie said. “Yum.”

  The conference room of D. Towler Investigations was located on the third floor of a narrow brick building on Warrenton Street, in the middle of Chinatown, above a street-level porn shop and a second-floor dim sum restaurant. The conference room smelled like ginger and pork grease. Coffin realized he was hungry.

  “I was damned sorry to hear about Kenji,” Towler said, propping his elbows on the stained conference table. He was a slender man in his late fifties with an accent that Coffin couldn’t quite pin down—West Virginia or Kentucky, maybe. He wore a soup-strainer mustache, a gray pin-striped suit, and brown cowboy boots. His red-gray hair was pulled back into a short ponytail. “She was a nice lady.”

  “She had lots of friends,” Coffin said. “Men, mostly.”

  Towler shot him a look. “Well, she sure as hell didn’t deserve to get stabbed to death, whatever else you might think of her.”

  “No,” Coffin said. “She didn’t.” He tapped the green file folder that lay, closed, on the conference table in front of Towler. “Tell me about Priestess Maiya.”

  Towler pulled a pack of Pall Malls from the inside pocket of his sport jacket. “Smoke?” he said, tapping a cigarette halfway out of the pack and offering it to Coffin.

  “Thanks,” Coffin said.

  The conference room was narrow, with carpet the color of bread mold and two high windows overlooking the busy street. The overhead fluorescents buzzed in their fixtures. A tall, wan ficus tree stood forlornly in the corner.

  Towler dug in his jacket pocket, pulled out a kitchen match, and popped its head into a sulfurous yellow flame with his thumbnail. He reached across the table and lit Coffin’s cigarette before lighting his own. “I tried smokin’ those all-natural ones, you know—the kind without all the chemicals in ’em. They taste pretty good, I guess, but after a while I realized the chemicals were the best part.” He flipped open the folder. “Priestess Maiya, a.k.a. Ruth McGurk. Can’t say I blame the girl for changing her name. Twenty-six years old. Father an associate dean at UMass Amherst, mother writes and publishes romance novels under the name of Rebecca Kayne. Very successful, apparently—got twenty-some books still in print.” He tapped the ash from his cigarette into a large green glass ashtray.

  “Not what I expected, somehow,” Coffin said.

  “Not exactly trailer trash, if that’s what you mean,” Towler said. “Ruth went to a fancy all-girls prep school and graduated near the top of her class. Went straight on to college at Brown and almost immediately became involved in an affair with a tenured English professor—guy named Porter Jenkins. Ruth was seventeen at the time.”

  “Whoops,” Coffin said.

  “No shit, whoops,” Towler said. “Professor Jenkins lost his job, his wife, and most of his property and almost went to jail. Attempted suicide right after they de-tenurized him. Not sure where he’s at now; two years ago he was teaching at a community college in Akron, Ohio, but he’s not there anymore.”

  “Ruth landed on her feet, I’m guessing.”

  “Yep,” Towler said, flipping a page. “She wrote three chapters of a tell-all memoir about the trauma of it all, found a fancy New York agent, and sold the book—get this—for half a million. Evidently there was quite a little bidding war.”

  “Lucky Ruth. Next stop, Oprah.”

  “Except the book never came out. Turns out the publisher wasn’t happy with the draft she turned in. Allegations of plagiarism, counterallegations of undue editorial interference, lawsuit, settlement. Ruth has to give back the lion’s share of the advance.”

  “Except she doesn’t.”

  “Bingo. She declares bankruptcy. Claims she had to spend the whole half million on living expenses and research for the book. Apparently she and the professor traveled in high style during the course of their affair, all paid for on his credit cards. She thought it necessary to retrace their steps—”

  “In order to refresh her memory,” Coffin said.

  “Bingo again. You’re getting good at this. Publisher’s lawyers threaten this and that, Ruth sues for harassment—”

  “And wins?”

  “You’re three for three. Judge rules she doesn’t have to pay back the advance, but she gets nothing on the harassment deal. Any guesses as to the name of the law firm representing the young lady?”

  “Scrooby, Sammitch, and Sole,” Coffin said, smoothing his mustache. It was bristly and coarse.

  “You’re a damn genius, Detective. For once the papers got it right.”

  “So . . .?”

  “So she doesn’t finish college, needless to say. She drops out of sight for a while, then reappears in about a year as the star of an ‘art’ film directed by a friend of hers from Brown.” Towler pulled a grainy eight-by-ten photograph from the folder and pushed it across the table to Coffin.

  Coffin looked at the photo. A younger version of Priestess Maiya lay sprawled on a green divan, naked, hair in blond curls. She held a mandolin loosely in her right hand. A white dog looked out a window in the background. In the foreground, a cat crouched in a chair. An older man stood at an easel, painting a picture.

  “Interesting,” Coffin said, eyebrows raised.

  “The movie’s about a French painter, guy named Balthus. He made a career of painting young girls without their clothes on. Evidently he was one weird dude. The movie was kind of an avant-garde hit.”

  “Go figure,” Coffin said.

  “Yeah. Go figure,” Towler said. “She made a couple more movies after this one—same director. Both were basically artsy-fartsy porno movies as far as I could tell. Lots of on-screen sex that didn’t look all that simulated. Both got crappy reviews. That’s right about the time she appears to have gotten herself involved in the meth scene. Somewhere between the last movie and when she changed her name to Priestess Maiya and started doing the performance art deal.”

  “I’d like to see one of those performances,” Coffin said.

  “You and me both. Apparently there’s videos of ’em on the Internet.”

  “She still a tweaker?”

  Towler leaned back in his chair. If there’d been a brass spittoon, Coffin thought, Towler would have spat in it. “Hard to say. She’s been in and out of rehab a couple times. Any guesses as to who picked up the tab?”

  “J. Hedri
ck Sole,” Coffin said. “Of course.”

  “Of course. Then a funny thing happens.”

  “Funnier,” Coffin said.

  “J. Hedrick gets picked up by the cops, wandering the streets near his town house in Cambridge. They think he’s senile or a drunk or both. He’s incoherent and combative, doesn’t know his address, appears to have pissed himself. They take him to New England Medical Center. The ER folks work him up and decide he’s had a stroke. Routine blood work comes back, lo and behold, turns out the old guy’s a meth head, too.”

  “The family that smokes together,” Coffin said.

  “Has strokes together,” Towler said. “At least they do if they’re in their seventies.”

  “Kenji know about this?” Coffin said.

  Towler nodded. “That’s the sticky part. She came in about a week before she was killed, and I walked her through pretty much the way you and I just did. I make a point of presenting sensitive information to clients in person. I don’t trust the telephone all that much. You never know who’s listening these days.”

  “How’d she react?”

  “She was enraged. She got very protective.”

  “Of her father or his money?”

  Towler pursed his lips for a moment. “I guess it’d be fair to say both. She wanted to call the cops, have Ruth charged with everything from drug dealing to attempted murder. I suggested she get back in touch with her attorneys first—that if her father was bankrolling Ruth’s meth habit, he’d likely be the one who’d ended up getting busted on drug charges.”

  Coffin picked up the photo of the naked Ruth McGurk and peered at it, allowing himself to admire her slim hips, the upward tilt of her nipples. “What do you think, D. Towler—did Ruth kill Kenji Sole?”

  Towler shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself the same question. I’ve not actually met the young lady, but everything I know about her suggests that she’s greedy, opportunistic, fundamentally dishonest, and sexually promiscuous to the point of making a career of it. She’s pretty enough to be a model, and all indications are she’s reasonably smart—she got a four-point-oh in prep school—but she’d rather suck some guy’s dick in a low-budget art movie than get a real job.”

  “Mad at her parents,” Coffin said. “Where were all the girls like her when I was in high school?”

  Towler wrinkled one side of his face into a half-smile. “I’ve known one or two like that in my time,” he said. “Fun on a date, but then the next day you’re pissing broken glass and their boyfriend’s looking to beat the shit out of you.”

  “The boyfriend you didn’t know they had,” Coffin said.

  Towler nodded. “What they wanted was to pull as many people as they could into their drama. Made ’em feel important. I think that’s Ruth, in a way. I don’t think she killed Kenji—she was having too much fun pushin’ her buttons. If anything, Kenji had it in for Ruth.”

  There was a sudden fusillade of what sounded like small-caliber gunfire from the street. It went on with considerable intensity for a minute or so, a blue cloud of smoke drifting past Towler’s windows.

  “Insurrection?” Coffin said, eyebrows raised.

  “Firecrackers,” Towler said. “Old Mr. Chin must have had another grandson. He’s the guy who owns the porn shop downstairs.”

  “What do you mean, Kenji had it in for Ruth? Ruth said she threatened her.”

  “It was a little worse than that. After Kenji left my office that last time, she came back about an hour later, very agitated. Know what she wanted to ask me?”

  “Where to hire a leg-breaker,” Coffin said.

  Towler rotated his mustache slightly to the left and eyed Coffin for a moment. “Bingo,” he said. “She danced around it a little bit, but yeah—pretty much.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I told her what you’re supposed to tell people when they ask you damn fool questions like that: that I wouldn’t be a party to a criminal conspiracy to commit murder, and that if I believed she was serious about going ahead I’d be forced to contact the police, despite our privileged relationship, as required by law. She got a little pale and apologized, but who knows where she went or who she called after she left my office.”

  “You didn’t call the cops?”

  “I didn’t think she was serious. Last I heard she was working with her attorneys to try to get the old boy declared incompetent.”

  “Any idea who might’ve killed her, if not Ruth McGurk?”

  Towler shrugged. “I figure it was somebody out in P’town. A jealous boyfriend, maybe. All those stab wounds don’t seem like woman’s work.”

  Coffin stood and stuck out his hand. “I appreciate your time, D. Towler,” he said.

  Towler’s handshake was dry and firm, exactly two shakes up and down. “My pleasure. Like I said, I liked Kenji.”

  Coffin squinted one eye. “I don’t mean to be nosy,” he said, “but.”

  Towler grinned. His teeth were long and yellow. “But no, I never had sex with her. She was good-looking and all, but not really my type.”

  “Too skinny? Too rich?” Coffin said, genuinely surprised.

  “Yep,” Towler said. “You’re nosy, all right. Kenji was a little too Anglo. I seem to have developed a preference for full-blooded Asian girls. Maybe it’s the neighborhood.”

  “One more thing,” Coffin said. “You ever eat at a noodle place around here called Phó Bo?”

  Towler tucked the green file folder under his arm. “Sure, I’ve eaten there. It’s just around the corner. Take a right at the porn shop, then another right.”

  “How is it?”

  “Not bad. The competition in this neighborhood’s pretty fierce, so almost all of these little Asian joints are okay. They all pay off the health inspectors, and they all serve reasonable chow.” Towler crossed to the door and pulled it open, letting Coffin step out into the hallway ahead of him. “They all got pretty little waitresses, too,” he said, face wrinkled into its half-smile. “Fresh off the boat.”

  Phó Bo was a cramped ten-table affair with a dirty linoleum floor and a big window around two sides. Coffin sat near the door, and a small, pretty waitress handed him a menu without smiling.

  “What you want to drink?” she said. She was about five feet three and very slender. She wore tight black jeans and a white cotton blouse, open one button more than was strictly necessary.

  “How about a Vietnamese beer,” he said.

  “Saigon or 333?”

  “Saigon,” Coffin said, scanning the menu. “And a small bowl of phó. With flank steak.”

  “No tendon? No tripe?”

  “No,” Coffin said. “Thanks.”

  “Ha,” the waitress said. “One gringo special. No sense of adventure.”

  Coffin watched her walk away, noting her slenderness again, the slight rotation of her hips. When the kitchen door had swung shut behind her, he looked out the big wraparound window and observed the traffic on Washington Street: the cars and trucks moving sullenly through the light rain; pedestrians hustling down the sidewalk—mostly Asian men and women, a few white people in lab coats or pale green nurses’ scrubs, coming from the big New England Medical Center complex a block away. Jamie would like it here, he thought. The big city with its throbbing energy and sheen of rain—horns honking, rainbow slick of oil in the road. This noodle joint, too, almost empty except for a table full of doctors and a couple of Asian families, the big window, the smell of beef broth and steam. Coffin realized he missed her—had been missing her for days now. The miscarriage and all the trouble they’d been having trying to conceive again hung over the relationship like a little blue anxiety cloud. The sex was no longer just sex—in fact, there was something a bit grim in Jamie’s determination to have a baby, Coffin thought; what had once been carefree in their relationship was now freighted with purpose.

  So he missed her. Missed her as she’d been before the miscarriage, missed her as she was now—the same, mostly, but with the slight, a
nxious edge of a woman whose plans are on hold, whose biology isn’t behaving entirely as planned.

  A fly landed on Coffin’s fork and rubbed its forelegs together. He waved it away. No one likes being thwarted, he thought.

  The waitress came back with his bottle of beer, poured it into a glass, and plunked the glass down on the table. “Saigon,” she said. “I be right back with your noodle.”

  The beer in the glass was mostly head. Coffin sipped at the foam. It was yeasty and tasted slightly skunked. Coffin didn’t mind. He waited a minute for the head to settle and poured more beer into the glass. The waitress came back again with a tray full of food.

  “Phó with flank steak,” she said, placing a large white bowl on the table.

  “That’s a small?” Coffin said.

  The waitress turned and pointed at an Asian man sitting in the corner. “See what he got? That a large,” she said. The bowl in front of the Asian man was the size of a bathroom sink.

  She took a plate from the tray and put it on Coffin’s table, next to the bowl of soup. “Bean sprout, basil, slice chili pepper, and lime,” she said. “You put inside.”

  “Inside?” Coffin said.

  The waitress rolled her eyes. “Inside the soup,” she said. “I show you.” She set her tray down on Coffin’s table, frowning a little, and started to pluck leaves from the sprig of basil and drop them into Coffin’s phó. She was very pretty. Coffin watched her small, quick hands use chopsticks to scoop the mung bean sprouts into his soup, and then add a few slices of jalapeño. When she was through, she squeezed the lime wedge into the soup, too. “All set,” she said. “You can put chili sauce inside, too, you like.”

  “Thank you,” Coffin said. The soup smelled delicious. The thin slices of flank steak were cooking in the broth as he watched.

  The waitress shrugged. “No big deal,” she said. “Slow now. It busy, you on your own. You want another beer?”