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by Konstantin

  He laughed. Behind him something glass shattered, the woman yelled, and one of the children shrieked. “Even before he got into the collection business, Coyle was no altar boy. He was a hell-raiser in high school, with a bad temper. He got in a few fights, boosted a few cars, and was generally one of the kids the local cops knew by name.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a criminal mastermind, though.”

  “No, not a mastermind.”

  “What happened with the video store guy?”

  “Ray Vessic? The usual thing that happens when a guy gets behind and doesn’t listen: somebody like Coyle comes around.”

  “Yeah, but when they do, they usually leave the guy in good enough shape to pay— that’s the point of collection, after all. But that guy took a hell of a beating. I was surprised they let Coyle cop to Assault II.”

  “He had a good lawyer— Jerry Lavin, rest his soul— and there were maybe some other things going on.”

  “What other things?”

  Losanto sighed wearily. “I heard it came up in Coyle’s plea negotiations. Apparently Vessic had a sideline going in the back of his store, something a little less mainstream than the latest teen screamer flick.”

  “Porn?”

  “The kid variety. He was selling the shit, ran chat rooms for the fans, and even made some films himself— all in all, a real prince. Coyle tipped the prosecutors to it, and Jerry even managed to sell them on the idea that finding out about the porn was the reason Coyle went off on Vessic. At the end of the day, it bought the kid the D felony deal.”

  “Good lawyer and good luck for Coyle. You have much faith in the outrage story?”

  Losanto snorted again. “Who knows? It makes a good tale, and Jerry, God bless him, was a creative guy, but I don’t know.” There was another crash at Losanto’s end, and more yelling. “And now I better get my ass in there, before I got outrage of my own to deal with.”

  I put down the phone, pulled my laptop over, and transcribed my notes about Coyle. I read them over, and reread what I already had on him from Arrua, Krug, J.T., Lia, and Werner, and tried to square it all. And couldn’t quite do it. Scary, bad-tempered, and violent— I’d seen those qualities in Coyle firsthand, and they didn’t jibe with the gentle giant, protector of the weak whom Lia had described. And then there was Coyle’s relationship with Holly. According to Krug, Holly was happier than he’d ever seen her, while Werner’s spin was that she was scared and wanted out. I knew who I was inclined to believe, but still…Losanto’s story was interesting but ultimately inconclusive. And of course I still had no idea of where Coyle might be or what he wanted with Werner. I shook my head. Maybe Coyle’s PO…maybe tomorrow.

  I pushed the laptop away and looked at my dim windows and wondered where Clare had gone. I got up and stretched and looked outside. The sky was drained of color and darkening at its eastern edge, and the cityscape was gray. I saw cars on the street, and more people, though none who looked like Clare returning. Lights were coming on in windows across the street and across town, scattered yellow pinpoints that only made the dusk seem colder.

  23

  Mike Metz was wrong about Thomas Vickers: he did call back, or rather his frail-sounding secretary did it for him. It was hideously early on Monday, and I was wrapped in a dream, and in a tangle of blankets, and in Clare’s long legs. She elbowed me awake and I groped for the telephone.

  “Mr. March?” the parchment voice said. “I’m calling from Mr. Vickers’s office.” I croaked something back at her, I’m not sure what. “Mr. Vickers would like to see you here, this afternoon at three,” she said. There was no Are you available? and not the slightest thought that I would decline. And I didn’t. She gave me the address, on Broadway south of Wall, and rang off.

  I looked at the clock: too early to call Mike. I propped myself on my elbow and looked outside. Ridged fangs of ice hung from the tops of my windows and shook in the wind that shook the glass. The sky was a thin, clear blue. Something— a gull— blew sideways across it, east to west and gone. A chill ran through me. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. Dust motes swam, and the last pieces of my dream tumbled past. Something with Holly— her icon’s face and kohl eyes and thousand-yard stare, and behind her the shadowed figure of a man, Bluto, maybe. And then it vanished, spinning away, faster than the gull.

  * * *

  When we finally rose, hours later, Clare moved quickly, showering, dressing, breakfasting, and slipping on her coat, all before I’d shaved. I asked her where she was going, and even to me the question sounded odd.

  Clare smirked. “To see my lawyer,” she said, and she turned up the collar of her long black coat.

  I nodded. “Is he a good one?”

  “Jay’s the best,” she said. “Not that there’s much for him to do. The pre-nup leaves nothing to the imagination.”

  “And that’s a positive thing?”

  “It is to me,” she said, and her grin turned chilly.

  After she left, I showered and shaved and sat at my laptop with a slice of toast. It took an hour and a half of typing, calling, navigating mazes of telephone menus, and waiting on bad-music hold, for me to find the guy who’d been Jamie Coyle’s parole officer. He was in the Division of Parole office in New Rochelle, and his name was Paul Darrow. He had a rich Bronx baritone, and what sounded like a nasty head cold.

  “Don’t tell me Jamie got himself jammed up again. For chrissakes, he was one of my success stories— one of the few.”

  “I don’t know if he’s jammed up, but I came across his name in a case, and I’m trying to find the guy, or at least find out a little more about him.”

  Darrow coughed and snorted, and somebody spoke to him in Spanish. “I got six customers waiting here already, March, so it’s not a real good time.”

  “When is?”

  He laughed. “Next month maybe, or how about next year?”

  I chuckled along with him to be polite, and eventually he consulted his calendar and found a slice of it that he could spare. “I got a meeting down in the city this afternoon, if you want to grab a coffee before.”

  “Fine,” I said, and we agreed on a time and place.

  I ate more toast and flicked on the news. The storm stories had already begun to fade, coming in fourth behind oil prices, cabinet appointments, and the arrest of a popular action-movie star for exposing himself to the nanny. There was no mention of the Williamsburg Mermaid, not on TV or in the papers. David’s luck was holding.

  I called Mike Metz to tell him about the meeting with Vickers, and he was quiet for a bit, while the gears turned.

  “You touched some kind of nerve,” he said.

  “And maybe not surprisingly. If Vickers’s client really was one of Holly’s costars, he might’ve seen the picture in the papers and recognized the tattoo, and he might find himself in the same kind of leaky boat my brother is in.”

  “In which case, we need to be very careful around Tommy.”

  “We? You’re coming along.”

  “I figure you can always use a little help being careful. And besides, it’ll be good to see that bastard again.”

  “You hear any more about the autopsy?”

  “Not yet, and I’m assuming the storm slowed things down a little— which is good news for us. Have you spoken to your brother yet?”

  “No.”

  “But you will?”

  “I will,” I said, without enthusiasm.

  I went for a run instead.

  * * *

  I met Paul Darrow at a diner on West Thirty-second Street, not far from the Division of Parole’s Manhattan office. The last of the lunch crowd was paying up and the windows were fogged and dripping. The air was heavy with bacon and burnt coffee and, underneath, some kind of cleaning fluid. The booths were gray vinyl, liberally taped.

  Darrow was a bald, barrel-shaped black man of about fifty, with a drooping face, a gray mustache, and wary, watery eyes. I knew him by his sneeze. He wore a sagging jacket of ha
iry gray tweed, a white shirt gone beige, and a shiny striped tie. His coat and hat sat next to him in the booth, and he was hunched over a teacup, breathing the steam. I slid into the seat across.

  He looked up and looked me over. “March?” I nodded. “I didn’t wait for you.” I shrugged and flagged down a waitress and ordered a ginger ale. Darrow sipped at his tea. “You worked that Danes thing, a couple of years ago,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “And that other thing, upstate.” The point being: I looked you up.

  I nodded. “What can you tell me about Jamie Coyle?”

  Darrow shrugged. “What’s to say? He’s a big, tough kid who, if you looked at him on paper, you’d think, Back inside in a year— two years tops, but who somehow managed to turn it around. Unless you calling me up means something different.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure it means anything. I’m looking for his girlfriend, so I’d like to talk to him. I can’t seem to find him, though.”

  Darrow nodded. “His girlfriend, the artist?”

  “You know her?”

  “He talked about her— a lot. He was real serious about her.”

  “Real serious how?”

  “Serious like how she changed his life, and turned his whole world around.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me he was saved by the love of a good woman?”

  Darrow smiled and sneezed and blew his nose. When he was done, he shook his head. “I’m saying that’s how Jamie tells it. To me, it sounded like the girl was pretty, and smart, and had money and some class, and that she wanted more from life than pumping out four kids and riding them on the bus on the weekends to see their daddy in the joint. I don’t know that Jamie’s met too many girls like that before, or ever. She lives in a different world, and he sees maybe how he can live there too. For his sake, I hope he’s right. But as for turning his life around, truth is he mostly did that himself, up in Coxsackie.”

  “A lot of good time?”

  “Yeah. He had trouble to start— that place is no tennis camp, and him being a white boy and all— but he didn’t hurt anybody too bad, or get hurt himself, and he went through a lot of the anger management courses, counseling and stuff, and did a lot of college work. He was halfway to a degree by the time he got out. Said he wanted to finish.”

  “Smart kid?”

  “Smarter than he looks, and especially smart when he watches his temper. He’s not afraid to work, either; he’s ambitious in his own way.”

  “He have problems with the temper?”

  “He used to, but it looked like he had it beat.”

  “What do you know about his plea?”

  “He went for Assault Two.”

  “Which sounded light, given what he did to that guy.”

  “What I read, the guy was a real piece of shit.”

  “Is that why Coyle went off on him?”

  Darrow blew his nose again. “I couldn’t tell you why Jamie did what he did. But the file says he provided information that took a piece of shit off the street, and that’s why he got a deal.”

  I nodded. And now, the $64,000 question. “You know where I can find him?”

  “You try his job?”

  “What job is that?”

  “He works maintenance at a condo complex in Tarrytown. His uncle is the super, and Jamie has an apartment there, in the basement.”

  “I didn’t know about that gig. I’d heard that he was working in the city somewhere…at some club.”

  Darrow went still, and his eyes went suddenly hard. “What club?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t get the name.”

  Darrow smacked his hand on the table, and made the mugs jump. “Fuckin’ Jamie,” he said. “He bitched about wanting extra money for school, but I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to lie.”

  “Did he do that often?”

  Irritation creased Darrow’s heavy face. “This is the first time I know about,” he said. “The caseloads we get— there’s only so much you can check— only so many hours in the day. What are we supposed to do, live in their fucking pockets?”

  I drank my soda and nodded. “You said before that Jamie was ambitious. Ambitious how?”

  “He was always working a plan— not always the same one, mind you, but Jamie was always shooting for something. Make some money, finish school. Make some money, open a restaurant. Make some money, buy some property.”

  “The money part was consistent.”

  He shrugged. “Kid lives in the real world.”

  I picked up the check, and Darrow and I walked out together. The light was already long and the wind felt like steel on my face. Darrow shivered and sneezed.

  There was no oblique way to ask it, so I just asked. “Is Jamie a dangerous guy?”

  Darrow turned to me. “Dangerous to who?”

  “To anyone.”

  “You know enough to know that’s a bullshit question. You, me, that old guy at the cash register in there— you push the right buttons with anyone, get them scared enough, angry enough, back ’em up against a wall, they’re dangerous.”

  “And Jamie no more so than anybody else?”

  “I wouldn’t have recommended him for discharge otherwise,” Darrow said. He pulled out a handkerchief, ran it under his nose, and squinted at me again. “On the other hand, I didn’t know shit about his moonlighting.”

  24

  Mike Metz was waiting in the lobby of Tommy Vickers’s building when I arrived. He was leaning on a column and tapping on his BlackBerry; his face was still pink from the cold, and full of concentration. We signed in at security, which did not quite entail a cavity search, and rode alone to the twenty-seventh floor. On the way, I talked about my meeting with Darrow. He drew a finger along his chin as the elevator crawled upward.

  “Coyle’s a mixed bag, I guess,” he said when I was through. “He’s gotten over his anger issues, except for knocking you around, and he was a model parolee, except for lying to his PO. And he was apparently very serious about Holly, maybe enough to get seriously mad at her, or seriously violent.”

  I watched the numbers change and thought about what Krug had told me— about how happy Holly had been— and what Lia said: “Look, he’s a good guy.”

  “Everyone’s a mixed bag,” I said. “I’m not sure quite what to make of Coyle.” Mike looked at me, one narrow brow raised. The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. We stepped into an empty corridor.

  “Your job is to develop alternative theories,” he said, “and this guy qualifies. Let the police sort out just how good a theory he is.”

  Vickers’s office was at the end of the hall, a dark wooden door with shiny brass hardware and a brass plate that read “TEV Consulting.” We went in, into a good-sized waiting room done up in Hollywood corporate: teak paneling, Oriental rugs, brass lamps, green leather furniture heavy with brass tacks. The prints on the walls were nautical: packet ships and schooners, laden with treasure and headed for some faraway tax haven with no money-laundering statutes on the books and no extradition.

  There were double doors ahead, and a big teak desk to the left; behind it was a woman whose hair was younger by decades than the rest of her. She was small and pale and powdered, and her improbable chestnut tresses were pulled in a cruel bun, away from her withered face. She looked from one of us to the other and squinted at her watch.

  “Mr. March?” In person, her voice was even more fragile than it sounded on the phone.

  “I’m March.”

  The woman looked at Mike, and looked distressed. “I wasn’t expecting—”

  A soft, raspy voice interrupted from the direction of the double doors. “It’s okay, Edie. There’s always room at the table for Mr. Metz.”

  Thomas Vickers was five foot nine, with a blocky frame covered in well-cut navy wool. His hair was a glossy white helmet on his square head, and his hooded eyes were bright blue. His features were fine but weathered— their edges and peaks sanded by age and shot with vein
s— and I put him somewhere north of sixty.

  He offered Mike a manicured hand. “Long time, Michael,” he said.

  “I should have called first,” Mike said, smiling.

  “Nonsense.” Vickers turned to me. “March, thanks for coming.” His grip was cold and surprisingly delicate. “And for bringing Michael along. I heard you did a lot of work for him; I didn’t know this was one of those times. Let’s sit.” Edie took our coats.

  Mike followed Vickers, and I followed Mike— through the double doors and down a corridor lined with law books and silence. We turned a corner and passed a large office. The door was open and I saw a sofa, a big mahogany desk, and a green Oriental rug inside. And I saw a stocky, dark-haired man in black trousers and a chocolate-brown jacket. He was sitting on the sofa, looking at me. I paused and looked back, and he got up and closed the office door. I caught up with Mike and Vickers, and wondered about the tension I’d felt, and the odd sense of dГ©jЕ· vu.