One-Way Ticket

by William G. Tapply

  He took my hand. “I know,” he said.

  As I walked back to where I’d left my car, I tried to convince myself that this was all going to work out, that Robert would actually stand up, take responsibility for himself, and do what he needed to do, and I tried to believe that if he did, Dalt and Jess, and Mike and Kimmie Warner, and Judge Adrienne Lancaster would all rise to the occasion, too.

  But addicted gamblers, like drug and alcohol addicts, are victims of their own weaknesses. They lie and steal and rationalize and evade and betray the people who love them, and I had no particular reason to believe that Robert Lancaster would be any different.

  And then there was Paulie Russo. I didn’t even want to think about him.

  Six

  BY THE TIME I’D wended my way homeward through the Friday-evening traffic, deposited my car in the parking garage at the far end of Charles Street, and walked up the hill to our house on Mt. Vernon Street, the streetlights were winking on and dusk was seeping into the city.

  I found Evie slouched in one of our Adirondack chairs out back. Henry was sprawled on the brick patio beside her. The only light came from the kitchen window and the darkening sky. A tall glass sat on the arm of Evie’s chair. She was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and one of my ratty old T-shirts. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders.

  She turned up her cheek for a kiss, which I gave her. “Sorry I couldn’t get here earlier,” I said.

  “Me, too. I made the G’n’Ts.” She pointed at the pitcher on the picnic table.

  I filled a glass. The ice cubes had shrunk to the size of sugar cubes. I fished out a few and gave them to Henry. He loved to crunch gin-flavored ice cubes between his teeth.

  “Mine, too,” said Evie. She held out her glass.

  I filled it and handed it to her. “How many is this?”

  “Huh?” she said. “You got me on a quota?”

  “Just wondering how fast I’ve got to drink to catch up.”

  “Oh, quite fast,” she said.

  I laid my jacket on the picnic table, pulled off my necktie, and took the chair beside her. “You must be hungry.”

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  I turned to look at her. “You okay?”

  “Me? Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “We kind of had a date,” I said. “It’s Friday night. I was going to make the drinks, grill some burgers. I crapped out on you.”

  “It’s all right, Brady. You gotta do what you gotta do.” She took a long swig of her drink. “You want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on,” she said. “Tell me a story. Amuse me. Perk me up. Make me laugh.”

  “It’s not a very amusing story.”

  “I don’t care. I want to hear about somebody else’s problems.”

  “You know I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but I’m your sweetie.”

  “You certainly are.”

  “So that makes it different.”

  “No,” I said. “It really doesn’t.”

  “Dalton Lancaster, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Anything new?”

  I wasn’t going to tell Evie how Paulie Russo’s goons had grabbed me in the parking garage. She didn’t need to know that. “It’s just client business, honey.”

  “You’re an old poop,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  She reached over, touched my cheek with the backs of her fingers, then trickled them down my arm until she found my hand. She gave it a squeeze. “I need to talk to you about something,” she said. Her voice was so soft I barely heard her.

  I turned to look at her. Her head was bowed so that her long auburn hair curtained her face, and I couldn’t see her expression. I reached over and touched her chin.

  She turned to look at me. Her eyes were wet.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She tried a smile. It didn’t work very well.

  I patted my lap. “Come here,” I said.

  She got up and sat sideways on my lap. She hooked one arm around my neck and pushed her face against my shirt.

  I hugged her with both arms. “What is it, babe?” I said.

  She shook her head against my chest.

  “You’re scaring me,” I said.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  I held her tight against me. I could feel her shoulders shaking. I stroked her back. She huddled there, making herself small in my lap. I hugged her and didn’t say anything.

  After a little while, she picked up the bottom of her T-shirt and wiped her face with it. “I’m better now,” she said. “Gin makes me weepy.” She adjusted herself on me, reached into one of her pockets, and took out a cigarette box and a plastic lighter. She thumbed open the box, plucked out a cigarette with her teeth, lit it, and blew a long plume of smoke up into the darkness. “Want one?” she said.

  “I quit,” I said.

  “Doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Of course I want one.”

  “But Mr. Iron Will Coyne won’t have one, because you quit.”

  “I thought you did, too,” I said.

  “I started again,”

  “How come?”

  “Miss Jell-O Will feels like it, that’s all.”

  “What’s going on, honey?”

  She puffed on her cigarette. It smelled good.

  “I’ve been kind of grouchy with you lately, right?” she said after a minute.

  “I guess so. Kind of.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well. Feeling shitty. Short-tempered. Complaining all the time.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s not fair, I know. I’m sorry.” She took another drag on her cigarette. The tip of it glowed orange in the gloom that was gathering in our walled-in backyard garden. “It’s not you, Brady,”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  She tilted her head back and looked at me. “What?”

  “Now is when you say, ‘It’s not you. It’s me.’ And then you tell me you can’t do it anymore, that I’m a great guy but it’s not working, or you—”

  Evie put her hand on my mouth. “Stop it. I wasn’t going to say anything like that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “I think it’s working okay.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “Don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Better than okay, I would’ve said.”

  “Even when I’m distant and grouchy?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That goes with the territory.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “There’s a big fat but coming at you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figured.”

  “It distracts me. Preoccupies me. Makes me not pay attention to you. Makes me treat you worse than you deserve. I wish it didn’t, but it does. It’s how I am. That’s what I mean when I say it’s me, not you.”

  “What’s the but, honey?”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out through her mouth. “It’s Daddy.”

  “Your father?”

  She nodded. “He’s… sick.”

  “Bad?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I think so. I’m assuming the worst. I keep telling myself he’s a rock, he’ll be all right, but deep down, I know it’s not true. He’s not going to be okay. I’m brimming with worst-case scenarios. They keep me awake. They come in my dreams. I try to be positive, but being positive seems stupid and unrealistic. So I’m being negative. And it’s eating me up.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I said nothing.

  “My mother called me at work a couple of weeks ago,” Evie said after a minute. “I never talk to her, you know that. We don’t like each other very much. I didn’t know she and my father were even in touch. They’ve been divorced for almost twenty years. So this was a big deal, her calling me. So I answer the phone, and she says, ‘It’s your mother,’ like that. And I go, ‘Oh. Hi
. How are you?’ And she says, ‘Your father’s sick. I thought you’d want to know.’ Just like that. She doesn’t have a clue about other people’s feelings. Anyway, she didn’t have any details, so I called him. Daddy. I expected him to laugh it off with his usual macho bluster. But he didn’t. He just said, ‘Yeah, I haven’t been feeling so hot lately.’ He sounded depressed and scared and lonely, like I never heard him before. I mean, that’s the opposite of him. He’s always carefree and brave and self-contained, you know?”

  I nodded. I’d only met Ed Banyon once, but that was the way I remembered him, too. He was a strong, happy man at peace with his life.

  Evie took a puff of her cigarette, then dropped the butt into her gin-and-tonic glass. “He didn’t want to talk about it. But finally I got him to tell me. He’s been losing weight. He’s nauseated all the time. No energy. No enthusiasm for anything. Even talking to me, he didn’t sound like he was happy to hear from me. You know how we are. Daddy and I always have fun.”

  Evie’s father lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, just over the bridge from San Francisco. He was an old ponytailed hippie who wore sandals and seashell necklaces and knee-torn jeans. He kept a coffee can of marijuana in the refrigerator, and Jimi Hendrix and Buffalo Springfield posters hung in his bedroom. It was pretty obvious that the two of them, Ed and Evie, had one of those special father-daughter bonds that those of us with only sons envy.

  “I wish you’d told me,” I said.

  “It’s not your problem.”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “Your problems are my problems.”

  “I didn’t say that right,” she said. “It’s just, I needed to be alone with it, get my head around it. The idea that my father might die.”

  “Maybe you should go see him,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I want to, but I don’t want to, too. Do you understand?”

  “It’s not really about what you want,” I said. “It’s about what you’ll regret if you don’t do it.”

  “He’s going into the hospital,” she said after a minute. “To have tests. Then we’ll know.”

  “It’s better to know than not know.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s got to be.” She snuggled against me. “When you can’t feel hope anymore, no matter how hard you try, even the worst thing is better than not knowing.”

  I waited until ten o’clock the next morning to call Judge Adrienne Lancaster. It was Saturday, so I tried her at her home in Belmont.

  She answered with an abrupt “Yes?”

  “Judge,” I said, “it’s Brady Coyne. I—”

  “Attorney Coyne,” she said. “This is most inappropriate. You should know better.”

  “I don’t have any business before your court,” I said. “This isn’t a professional issue. It’s a family matter.”

  “Hm,” she said. “A family matter, you say? Your family or mine?”

  “Yours, Judge. I’m wondering if I can see you this morning.”

  “This morning? Can’t it wait?”

  “No, ma’am, it really can’t.”

  “It’s that urgent, is it?”

  “I think it might be. Yes.”

  She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Very well, Mr. Coyne. I shall have to trust your judgment. You may come here to my house. You know where I live?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “You’ll find me around back pruning my roses.”

  “I’ll be there in less than an hour,” I said.

  Seven

  DURING THE TWENTY-ODD years since Frederick Billings Lancaster, Dalt’s father, died, his mother, Judge Adrienne Lancaster, had been living alone in their big half-timbered Tudor on Belmont Hill near the Lexington line. It took me about twenty minutes in the sparse Saturday-morning traffic to drive there from my own house on Beacon Hill. You had to know where it was located, because it was screened from the road by a stand of hemlocks, and it was unmarked by a sign or even a mailbox.

  A long peastone drive wound through flower gardens and rectangles of lawn and grape arbors and fruit trees and terminated in a circular driveway in front. I parked there and walked around to the back.

  I found Judge Lancaster sitting in a wicker chair and reading a newspaper at a glass-topped picnic table on the fieldstone patio behind the house. She was wearing black high-topped sneakers, baggy blue jeans, and a long-sleeved white shirt with the tails flapping. A wide-brimmed straw hat and a pair of cotton work gloves sat on the table by her elbow.

  She was about seventy and had sat on the Superior Court bench for more than twenty years. Among lawyers, she had the best reputation a judge could have: She was tough but fair, and she ran a tight ship. I’d been a Massachusetts lawyer almost as long as she’d been a Massachusetts judge, and I’d never once heard a whisper of scandal about Judge Lancaster. Not everybody agreed with her decisions, of course, and I’d never heard anybody accuse her of being warm and cuddly or of having a bawdy sense of humor. But nobody questioned Judge Adrienne Lancaster’s integrity, or her commitment, or her intelligence, or her mastery of the law.

  Over the years I’d argued a few cases before her. If Judge Lancaster believed that the lawyers—defenders or prosecutors, it didn’t matter—were slacking, she didn’t hesitate to chide them from the bench right there in the courtroom. She had a sharp tongue. It tended to keep you on your toes.

  She looked up from her newspaper, poked at her glasses, and waved at me.

  I went over. A pitcher and a couple of glasses sat on the table.

  She held out her hand, and I took it. She shook hands like a man. She didn’t smile. “Sit down, Mr. Coyne. Pour us some tea, why don’t you.”

  I poured two glasses of iced tea, handed one to her, then sat and gazed out at the formal gardens and lawns of her vast backyard, which sloped away behind the house and disappeared down the hillside. It was June, and everything seemed to be blooming. The mingled scent of dozens of varieties of flowers and the almost subsonic drone of bees filled the air. From her spot on top of Belmont Hill, the Prudential Building and the John Hancock Tower, the tallest buildings in Boston, loomed side by side through the thin city smog on the horizon.

  “You’ve got quite a view, Judge,” I said.

  “After a while you don’t notice it,” she said. She peered at me. Her eyes were the color of ice. “Well? What did you want, Attorney Coyne, that you had to come here to see me on a Saturday morning?”

  During the drive over, I’d thought hard about what I should and shouldn’t say to her, and how I should say it. It was delicate, and I hadn’t worked it out very well.

  “Please don’t ask me to explain what I’m going to tell you,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  “Here it is.” I cleared my throat. “If you have a case on your docket involving the Russo crime family,” I said, “I’m here to urge you to recuse yourself. It involves the safety and well-being of your family.”

  Her smile was without humor. “You don’t think a statement such as that deserves an explanation?”

  “Of course it does,” I said. “I just cannot provide it.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Won’t.”

  “My family, you say. Meaning…?”

  I shook my head.

  She gazed past me toward her gardens. She took an absent-minded sip of her iced tea, then put down her glass and shifted her eyes to me. “You’re asking me to trust you on this.”

  I nodded.

  “You are my son’s attorney, Mr. Coyne. This must involve him.” She arched her eyebrows at me.

  I took a sip of tea and avoided her eyes.

  She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “A judge might be called upon to risk the hypothetical well-being of a family member to perform her duty. But no judge should ever permit the integrity of her courtroom to be questioned or compromised. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Attorney Coyne? My integrity, the integrity of my courtroom? T
he integrity of the law?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I believe so.”

  She nodded. “Fair enough. I won’t ask you any more questions. I respect your discretion.”

  “Thank you, Judge.”

  “I blame Frederick, you know,” she said after a minute. “My late husband. He was a hard man, and Dalton was a sweet, sensitive, rather ineffectual boy. He had no calling to the law. He only wanted to please his father. It was inevitable that he would rebel. Restaurants, of all things.” She smiled at the very thought of a Lancaster in the restaurant business. “Even since Frederick died, my son has continued to wrestle with his father’s demon.” She shook her head. “What could he have done this time?” She looked at me. “That was rhetorical. I did not mean it as a question.”

  I smiled. “I didn’t intend to answer it.”

  “Was there anything else you wanted to say?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s it.”

  She picked up her straw hat and fitted it onto her head. Then she pulled on her gloves and stood up. “Let me show you my roses, Attorney Coyne. They are especially spectacular this year.”

  A half hour later we were standing beside my car in the gravel turnaround in front of Judge Lancaster’s house. I was holding a vase containing two dozen long-stemmed yellow rosebuds.

  “I know it took courage for you to do what you did today,” said the judge. “I’m not pleased with what you had to say, but I do appreciate it.”

  “Not courage,” I said. “It was just something I had to do.”

  “Sometimes simply doing one’s duty demands more courage than most people have,” she said. “Don’t underestimate doing your duty. And now it seems that I must determine what my duty is.” She cocked her head and gave me a little cynical smile. “I’ve got you to thank for that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She held out her hand. “As am I,” she said.

  I shook her hand. “Thanks for the flowers. Evie will love them.”

  “Roses are good for whatever ails you,” said Judge Adrienne Lancaster. “I don’t know how I would survive without my roses.”

  When I walked into the house bearing a giant bouquet of yellow roses, Evie smiled hugely, took them from me, and buried her face in them. Then she put them on the table, wrapped her arms around my neck, and gave me a long, deep kiss. “You are the sweetest man,” she murmured.