A Fine Line

by William G. Tapply

  After I hung up from the last call, I pushed myself back from my desk, lit a cigarette, and stared out the window.

  Ethan. Where the hell are you?

  I hauled out my big Boston-Cambridge Yellow Pages and looked up Vintage Vinyl. I picked up the phone, then put it down and glanced at my watch. It was a little after four.

  “Hey, Henry,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I turned off the electric coffeemaker, rinsed out the pot, snapped on Henry’s leash, picked up the sweatshirt he’d been lying on, and went across the street to the parking garage. I spread my sweatshirt on the backseat and told Henry that was his place. He hopped in, sat on the sweatshirt, and pressed his nose against the window.

  I hooked onto Mass. Ave. and crossed the Charles River on the Harvard Bridge. It was another glorious June day, and the river was dotted with sailboats and one-man sculls and kayaks and canoes. I spotted a couple of bass boats with men chucking spinning lures toward the banks. Seeing them reminded me that I hadn’t been fishing in a couple of weeks. I’d give Charlie McDevitt a call, see if he could free himself up for a day over the weekend.

  I needed to go fishing. Fishing, I’d discovered over the years, was an excellent antidote to the bleakness I always felt when somebody I knew died.

  Vintage Vinyl, the record shop where Ethan worked, was on Mass. Ave., and I spotted it on the left outside of Central Square just past City Hall. Finding a place to leave my car was a greater challenge.

  I finally slid into an empty space on a side street. I hooked Henry to his leash, locked the car, and the two of us strolled over to the record store.

  The storefront was just wide enough for a door and a display window. A hand-painted sign in the window read: “Old LP’s and 45’s Bought and Sold.” A dozen or so album covers sandwiched in protective plastic covers were on display—Frank Sinatra, looking boyish and skinny the way he did in From Here to Eternity, Nat King Cole holding a cigarette, Cheap Thrills, the Janis Joplin breakout with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Johnny Mathis, the Beatles’ White Album. I wondered if record album collectors valued the sleeves the way bibliophiles prized mint-condition book jackets. I was willing to bet that they didn’t actually play the records.

  Henry and I went inside. Joan Baez was singing “Baby Blue” over the speakers. Both walls were lined with shelves packed with record albums, and a long narrow table stood in the middle. It held boxes of 45’s.

  A pale, lanky man with a receding hairline and a ponytail and rimless glasses was sitting at an ancient rolltop desk in the corner beside the door. He was talking on the telephone, and when he spotted me, he held up a finger.

  I riffled through the 45’s. “Oh Gee” by the Crows. Vintage 1953. “Come Go with Me,” the Del Vikings. A couple of years later, I seemed to recall. Before I was even born.

  The guy at the desk hung up and came over. Up close I saw that he was younger than I’d thought. Thirty, maybe.

  When he noticed Henry, he scooched down and rubbed the dog’s head. “It’s old Henry. How you doin’, man?”

  Henry lay down and rolled onto his back.

  The guy looked up at me and grinned. “He loves to have his belly scratched. You must be a friend of Ethan’s, huh?”

  I nodded and held out my hand. “Brady Coyne.”

  He shook my hand. “I’m Phil,” he said. “So how come you got Henry? Ethan brings this mutt to work with him sometimes. Nice dog. Knows how to behave. Customers like him.”

  “Are you the owner?” I said.

  “Of this place?” He rolled his eyes. “Nah. Not me. I couldn’t afford it. We don’t make any money here. Conrad, the guy who owns it, he collects this stuff. I think the store is some kind of tax thing. We get a dozen people in here in a day, we’ve had a good day, and most of ’em don’t buy anything. Conrad sells some stuff on the Internet, I guess. Mainly, this is his collection. You lookin’ for something?”

  “I was hoping to catch Ethan,” I said. “Return Henry to him.”

  “Ethan works nights,” said Phil. “Comes on at six.”

  “Is he scheduled to be here tonight?”

  “Not tonight.” He shrugged. “He was supposed to be here last night, but he never showed up.”

  “No?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Well, shit, man, I don’t know what happened. He just didn’t show up. I was here. I can’t leave ’til Ethan gets here, you know? I waited ’til close to seven, and no Ethan. So I called Conrad—that’s the owner, Conrad Henshall—and finally he came in so I could go home.”

  “Does this happen a lot?”

  “What, Ethan not showing up?”

  I nodded.

  “No. He’s pretty reliable usually.”

  “Did he call in last night, do you know?”

  “He didn’t call me,” said Phil, “and Conrad didn’t seem to know anything about it.” Phil adjusted his glasses and frowned at me. “You must know what’s going on. I mean, you’re taking care of his dog, right? So what’s up with Ethan?”

  “I just want to return his dog,” I said. I fished one of my business cards from my wallet and gave it to Phil. “If you hear from Ethan, tell him to give me a call, will you?”

  Phil took my card and looked at it. “Lawyer, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Ethan in some kind of trouble?”

  “He’s in trouble with me,” I said. “I’m getting sick of taking care of his dog.”

  “Aw,” said Phil, “Henry’s a good old pooch.”

  “You want to watch him for a while? He’s all yours.”

  Phil held up both hands. “Hey, not me, man.”

  I nodded. “That’s what everybody says.”

  Outside the store I paused to light a cigarette.

  Then I heard a soft voice say, “Sir?”

  I turned. A large man wearing yellow-tinted glasses and an expensive-looking gray suit was standing there. He seemed to have emerged from the alley beside the store. He was squinting at me through his glasses.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “I don’t believe so,” he said. “Perhaps I can help you. My name is Conrad Henshall.”

  I nodded. “You own this place?”

  “That I do.”

  He held out his hand, and I shook it. “My name is Brady Coyne. I’m a lawyer. I’m looking for Ethan Duffy. I understand he works here.”

  “Mr. Duffy no longer works here,” he said.

  “Oh? Your man in there, Phil, he told me—”

  “Philip is the employee. I am the owner. I don’t make it a practice to confide in my employees.”

  “Did Ethan quit, or did you fire him?”

  “May I ask you what difference it makes?”

  “Ethan’s father died last night.”

  Henshall looked at me from behind his yellow-tinted glasses, as if he expected me to elaborate.

  Instead, I said, “Have you been in touch with Ethan since yesterday?”

  “As I told you, sir,” he said, “young Mr. Duffy no longer works for me.”

  “Does that mean you haven’t talked with him?”

  “It means I’d have no reason to talk with him.”

  “And this is what you told the police?”

  He smiled. He had a small, rather unpleasant mouth, and his smile suggested neither humor nor good will. “If I had told the police something different, it would mean I was lying either to you or to them, wouldn’t it?”

  I nodded. “I guess it would.” I fished out a business card and gave it to him. “If you talk to Ethan, ask him to call me, will you?”

  He put the card into his pocket without looking at it, then dipped his head at me. “If I can be of any more service to you, sir, don’t hesitate to call on me.”

  “You can count on it,” I said.

  SEVEN

  The Thursday afternoon traffic out of Cambridge was typically tangled, and by the time I took the West Concord exit
off Route 2, it was close to six o’clock. I stopped at the little grocery store by the train station and bought six cans of Alpo and a bag of dry dog food. Then I went to the liquor store across the street and picked up two bottles of Merlot.

  I don’t know anything about wine. Those bottles cost twenty bucks apiece. How bad could they be?

  Evie lived in a condominium complex that had been carved out of an old orchard. Many of the fruit trees had survived the bulldozers, so the area bloomed lavishly—and aromatically—in the springtime. A brook meandered through the grounds, and the developers had dammed it up in several places, forming a series of interconnected little ponds. Hundreds of mallards, once wild but now tame, lived there year-round, as did a resident flock of Canada geese. The birds thrived on handouts, and they weren’t shy about soliciting strangers.

  I parked in the visitor’s lot, released Henry with instructions not to run away, and watched while he checked out the shrubs, peed on most of them, squatted awkwardly for a massive dump, and then resumed snuffling the bushes. When I called him, he came. I told him he was a fine, obedient animal, snapped on his leash, tucked my bag of groceries under my arm, and we headed for Evie’s townhouse.

  About halfway there, a flock of webfoots materialized behind us. They gabbled and quacked, hissed and honked, and Henry nearly yanked me off my feet trying to get at them. I stamped my foot at them, and Henry growled. The dumb birds just stood there with their heads cocked, looking at us.

  Evie enjoyed her flock of tame waterfowl, even if they did litter the lawns and parking areas and pollute the ponds. Evie was an amateur ornithologist. When she went fishing with me, she brought her binoculars and prowled around the banks of my beloved woodland streams looking for birds, while I waded in the water looking for trout.

  Once, a few months after Walt Duffy’s accident at Quabbin I took her in to meet him. They talked about birds, and he showed her his collection of decoys and carvings. Evie collected bird carvings, too. Walt flirted outrageously with her, and she flirted right back at him.

  Afterward, she told me he was a seriously depressed man.

  I rang Evie’s bell. Henry sat on the stoop expectantly.

  When she opened the door and smiled at me, I felt a little shiver, the way I always did when I first saw Evie after not having seen her for a few days. Evie Banyon was slender and tall—only a couple of inches shorter than me—and her hair was the color of high-grade maple syrup, halfway between amber and gold. Now she had it pulled back in a ponytail, and it cascaded down her back nearly to her waist. She was wearing cutoff jeans and one of my old blue dress shirts knotted over her midriff.

  She wrapped both arms around my neck and kissed me hard and long on the mouth. I reciprocated her kiss with equal enthusiasm, but since I had bags of wine and dog food under my arms and a dog on a leash, I couldn’t hug her tight against me the way I wanted to. No need. She pressed herself against me anyway.

  Suddenly she pulled away. “Something’s lapping my leg.” She looked down. “Oh. Well, hello there.”

  “Meet Henry,” I said. “He’s an orphan.”

  Evie squatted down and stroked Henry’s head. He lapped her face, and Evie giggled. “He’s a friendly fellow, isn’t he?”

  “He loves you,” I said. “Hard to blame him.”

  She stood up. “His name’s Henry?”

  “Yes. His full name is Henry David Thoreau Duffy. He’s Walt Duffy’s dog. Actually, you met Henry that time.”

  She nodded. “You told me that Mr. Duffy . . .”

  “Yes. Walt died.”

  She frowned and nodded. “Are you okay?”

  I shrugged. “Not really.” I wanted to tell her that Walt had apparently been murdered, but Detective Mendoza had instructed me not to. It was hard to keep any kind of secret from Evie.

  She put her arm around my waist and laid her cheek against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  I turned and kissed the top of her head. “Shit happens, I guess.”

  “That it does,” she said. “So what’s with the dog?”

  “How’d you like to adopt a loving, well-behaved Brittany for a few days?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No. I’m serious. Henry would love it here, with all your tame mallards for entertainment. Brittanies are excellent bird dogs, you know.”

  “Brady, for heaven’s sake, I can’t take care of a dog.”

  “You can take care of a dog better than I can,” I said. “At least you live on the first floor, and you’re out here in the country, practically. If Henry shits on the lawn, nobody will even notice with all the duck and goose turds around. Me, I live on the sixth floor in the middle of the damned city. No place for an outdoorsy dog like Henry. So it seems to me . . .”

  Evie grinned and shook her head.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Nobody wants him. He’s a great dog. It would probably only be for a few days. Until Ethan shows up.”

  “Ethan?”

  “Walt’s son.”

  “Where’s Ethan?”

  “I don’t know. That’s another story. Right now, I’ve got to figure out what to do with Henry. He’s taken over my life.”

  “So put him in a kennel.”

  I looked down at Henry, who was sitting there on Evie’s stoop looking up at us. “I can’t do that. He’d hate it in a kennel.”

  “Well,” said Evie, “bring him inside, anyway. It looks to me like you brought us some wine. Let’s open one of those bottles, let it breathe for a few minutes, then have some.”

  “I also brought dog food.”

  “So we’ll feed the dog, too. Come on.”

  We went in. Henry wandered through the downstairs, sniffing the furniture, then lay down in the middle of the living-room carpet where he could keep an eye on things.

  I went upstairs to Evie’s bedroom, where I kept a few changes of clothes, and got out of my suit. When I got back to the kitchen, Evie had one of the wine bottles uncorked, and Henry was eating from a mixing bowl.

  “You fed him,” I said.

  “Yes. And I’m going to feed you pretty soon, too. But first, you strike me as a man who could use a nice, soothing massage.”

  An hour later Evie and I were lying naked under the sheets in her bed sipping wine. Henry had followed us upstairs to the bedroom. He was asleep on the floor by the door.

  “I was thinking,” said Evie.

  “Oh, oh,” I said.

  “I was thinking maybe it’s time you moved. Find someplace where you can keep a dog. You love dogs. You’ve been in that place in the city ever since you got divorced. You keep saying it’s temporary, and it’s been, what, ten years?”

  “Eleven,” I said.

  “So what are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know. It’s inertia, that’s all. I have no reason to move. I mean, it would be one thing if you and I were going to move in together, but . . .”

  “We’ve talked about that,” she said. “It would put too much pressure on us. Neither of us is ready. We agreed on that, remember?”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  She sat up and frowned at me. “What are you trying to say, Brady?”

  I shrugged. “When I’m not with you, I miss you. When—when bad things happen, I feel like I need you to be with me. Talking on the phone is great, but it’s not the same thing.”

  She nodded. “I feel that way, too.”

  “So maybe we should think about it some more.”

  “Living together?”

  I nodded.

  She lay back and gazed up at the ceiling.

  After a minute, I said, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m trying to imagine it,” she said quietly.

  “Living with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  She turned her head and looked at me. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious about thinking about it some more, anyway. I don’t know. It’
s a big step.”

  “You’re damn right it’s a big step,” she said. “I, for one, don’t move in and out with people willy-nilly. If we decided to live together, that would be it.”

  “That’s how I feel about it, too,” I said.

  “It would be a commitment.”

  “Yes.”

  “Scary,” she said.

  “Very scary,” I said.

  When we were at my place, I did the cooking. At Evie’s place, she did it. This time, she said she was in the mood for a big salad and fresh bread. So I sat at the kitchen table and watched her dump stuff into her big wooden salad bowl. Bibb lettuce, spinach greens, slivers of Bermuda onion, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, green peppers, shiitake mushrooms, green olives, ripe olives, chickpeas, raisins, a can of baby shrimp, a can of tuna fish, a can of crab meat. She splashed on some vinaigrette dressing, tossed it with wooden spoons, sprinkled on some chopped chives, took a pass over it with the pepper mill, and put it on the table.

  I snaked out a green olive with my fingers, sucked out the red pimento, then ate the olive.

  She brought over a loaf of French bread on a cutting board and handed me a serrated knife. I sliced the bread.

  I was thinking how much fun it would be if Evie and I took turns making dinner every night. I kept that thought to myself. It was, indeed, scary.

  After we ate, we cuddled on her sofa, watched an old Hitchcock movie on her TV, and finished the Merlot.

  Henry slept on the cool flagstones in Evie’s foyer.

  Around eleven, we took Henry out for a ramble around Evie’s yard. I didn’t bother leashing him. He’d proven he would come when I called him.

  Frogs were grumbling from the ponds, and some night birds were swooping around, snagging mosquitoes. The ducks and geese had apparently bedded down for the night, but Henry still found many fascinating things that needed to be snuffled.

  We wandered over to my car. I called Henry and told him to jump into the backseat. Then I leaned back against the door. Evie put her arms around my waist, pressed herself against me, and tucked her face into my shoulder. “If you lived here, you’d be home now,” she whispered.