Outwitting Trolls

by William G. Tapply

  “You didn’t have a key card?”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Nichols,” said Benetti, “I tried to leave that door unlatched. I tried to see if I could leave it open a crack. You know what?”

  Sharon shrugged.

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Benetti. “That door is heavy, and the way it’s hung, if you try to leave it ajar, it just swings shut and the latch engages and it automatically locks.”

  Sharon was shaking her head. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “What I’m getting at,” said Benetti, “is that you couldn’t have found that door ajar. It had to’ve been locked. So there were only two ways for you to get inside. One, you had a key card and let yourself in, or, two, Mr. Nichols let you in. Since you say you didn’t have a key…”

  “I didn’t mean the door was ajar, exactly,” said Sharon. “It was all the way shut but not latched. When I pushed on it, it swung open.”

  “It wasn’t ajar.”

  “No. It was shut but not latched.”

  “You told us it was ajar. Which was it?”

  “Shut but not latched,” Sharon said. “That’s what I meant to say.”

  “It couldn’t have been,” said Benetti.

  “Well, it was,” said Sharon, “because all I had to do was push it open. And Ken was dead when I went inside.”

  “You mean,” said Benetti, “that he was alive when you went in. But then he was dead when you left.”

  Sharon turned to me.

  “Okay, that’s it,” I said to Sharon. “Don’t say anything else.” I looked at Horowitz. “Unless you intend to charge my client with a crime, we’re done for tonight.”

  He shrugged. “We’re not charging anybody with anything right now.”

  “Then we’re out of here,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Horowitz said. “I guess we’re done for now anyway.” He looked at Sharon. “We’ll want to talk to you again.” He smiled. “You’ve been very cooperative, and we appreciate it.”

  She nodded. “I want to cooperate. I want you to catch whoever did this to Ken.”

  “We’ll talk again,” he said. “You should bring your lawyer.”

  “Count on it,” I said.

  Six

  We all left the conference room. Horowitz and Benetti went over to the elevators. Sharon and I headed for the front lobby.

  “Did I do okay?” she asked.

  “You did fine,” I said. “You kept your cool. You didn’t let yourself be bullied. You seemed entirely truthful. You were very credible.”

  “I was entirely truthful,” she said.

  I smiled. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

  “I don’t think they believed me, though,” she said. “When I said why I went to Ken’s room. That I thought we might have sex.”

  “People who’ve never been divorced don’t understand how complicated it can be.”

  “The relationship between former spouses, you mean,” Sharon said.

  I nodded. “People seem to expect us to hate each other. They always seem surprised to know that we don’t. That we might actually like each other. That there might still be something like love between us.”

  “You and Gloria, you mean.”

  I nodded. “You and Ken.”

  “You believe me, then.”

  “Sure I do.”

  When we stepped outside, I remembered that the police had taken Sharon’s jacket. It was a chilly April evening, and a soft rain was still falling, and she was standing there in her thin silky blouse hugging herself. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

  She looked up at me. “Oh. Thank you, Brady.”

  At that point a young man wearing jeans and sneakers and a green windbreaker approached us. “Mrs. Nichols?” he said. “My name’s Josh Neuman. I’m a reporter with the Boston Herald, and I—”

  “She has nothing to say,” I said quickly.

  He ignored me and stepped closer to Sharon. “Are you a suspect in your husband’s murder? You found the body, isn’t that right? Did you—”

  I stepped in between him and Sharon. “Go away,” I said.

  “You’re Brady Coyne, right?” he asked. “Her lawyer? Come on, Mr. Coyne. Let me do my job here.”

  “I’m sure the police will have a statement for you,” I said, “but we don’t. Mrs. Nichols is tired and upset, and we’re both leaving now.”

  “Can I talk with her tomorrow?” Josh Neuman asked me. “Will you allow her to give me an interview? Or will you talk to me?”

  “You can call me on Monday,” I said. “No promises. Now leave us alone.”

  “You got a card? What’s your number?”

  “Look it up,” I said.

  “Okay. I’ll call you.” He gave Sharon a little bow, turned, and went back into the hotel.

  I turned to Sharon. “Sorry about that.”

  “Thanks for handling it.”

  I nodded. “Do you need a ride home?”

  “I’ve got my car,” she said.

  “Did you have a valet park it?”

  “No. I left it in the lot. It’s right over there.” She pointed toward a sea of vehicles in a well-lit parking area. “Why?”

  “A valet might be able to corroborate the time you got here,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “too bad. That would help, huh?”

  I shrugged. “It would help, sure. No biggie, though.”

  We were standing under the portico in front of the main entrance to the hotel. The misty spring rain made halos around the lights that illuminated the brick pathways.

  “I don’t understand about the door,” Sharon said. “It was unlatched. I guess I said ajar, and that’s not precisely what I meant. It was closed, but I was able to push it open. So maybe they couldn’t make the door do that. I can’t explain that. That’s how it was. I wasn’t lying.”

  “There are always things like that,” I said. “Anomalies. Details that don’t fit, that can’t be explained. With murders, things are never neat and tidy. The police know that. When everything is orderly and logical, they begin to worry. That’s a sure sign that something is seriously off.”

  “I can see how it looks,” she said. “About the door, I mean. It looks like Ken had to have been alive when I got there. If the door wasn’t unlatched, the only way I could’ve gotten in was if he let me in.”

  I shrugged.

  “But it was unlatched.”

  I nodded.

  “They were playing good cop, bad cop,” she said. “Except the sweet-looking female was the bad cop, and the crabby man was the good one.”

  “Actually,” I said, “they’re both good cops.”

  “Well, Detective Benetti was pretty hostile, I thought.” She turned to me and gave me a hug. “Thanks for being here for me.”

  I patted her shoulder. “That’s what lawyers are for. Will you be all right?”

  “Oh, sure.” She smiled quickly. “Of course, my ex-husband, who I was falling in love with all over again, got murdered tonight, and I was the one who found his bloody body, and the police think I’m the one who killed him. But, yes, actually, I am. I’m okay.” She shrugged. “Maybe it just hasn’t hit me yet.”

  “Do you have somebody who can stay with you?” I asked. “It might be better not to be alone tonight.”

  “It’s pretty late,” Sharon said, “but maybe I’ll call Ellen. Even if she can’t come over, it will help if I can just talk to her.” She put a hand on my shoulder, went up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. “Thanks, Brady Coyne. I’m sorry to drag you away from whatever you were doing tonight. I’m so grateful to you for being here for me.”

  I patted her shoulder and did not return her kiss. “I’m glad I could do it,” I said.

  “Thank you for your jacket, too. I’ll return it next time I see you, if that’s okay.” She gave me a quick smile. “I expect we’ll be seeing each other again.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure we wi
ll. Don’t worry about the jacket.”

  “Well, good night,” she said, and then she turned and began walking through the misty rain in the direction of the parking lot.

  I hurried after her. “Wait,” I said. “I’ll walk with you.”

  “No need,” she said. “I’m perfectly capable.”

  “I know,” I said, “but in my head I hear the voice of my mother, reminding me that I should always walk the young lady to her door.”

  Sharon turned and smiled at me. “How extraordinarily old-fashioned.” She hooked her arm through mine. “It’s really quite sweet. Thank you.”

  It took a little more than half an hour to navigate the wet, empty city streets from the hotel on Route 9 in Natick to my parking garage on Beacon Hill in Boston, and another fifteen minutes to walk the length of Charles Street to my town house halfway up Mt. Vernon Street. It was three thirty in the morning when I stepped into the house.

  Henry greeted me at the door with a lot of happy whining. I knew what he’d been thinking: This time he’s never coming home, and who’s going to feed me?

  His entire hind end wagged when I knelt down to rub his ears and scratch his forehead.

  Who loves you like a dog?

  I let him out into the backyard, and then I used the kitchen phone to check my voice mail.

  I had two messages.

  The first was from Billy. He’d called at 11:06 P.M. “Hey, Pop,” he said. “Hope your lawyer thing went all right. As for us, we ended up having a great dinner at Mosca’s. Good choice of restaurants, man. The osso buco was outstanding. I bet that’s what you’d’ve ordered. It came with a nice garlicky risotto, and…Well, hell. It was too bad you had to leave. So anyway, um, listen. You remember how me and Gwen, we wanted to talk to you and Mom, right? Well, I’m sorry, but we ended up telling her, um, what we had to say. But I want to talk to you. Gwen and I do, I mean. Not on the damn phone. Look. We’re going to be around for a few more days. Just let me know when’s good for you. We can come to your place just about anytime—well, not tomorrow, but some day this coming week—have a beer, or maybe grill something, like the good old days at your condo on Lewis Wharf. You provide the grill, me and Gwen’ll bring the meat. How’d that be? Or if you’d rather, we could meet somewhere and get something to eat. Whatever. Let me know, ’kay?” He paused, then said, “Well, okay. That’s it. Call me. You’ve got my cell number. Love you, man.”

  The second message came at 1:14 A.M. “Hey, Brady?” It was Alex Shaw, calling from her house in Garrison, Maine. “Are you okay? I sorta expected to hear from you tonight. It’s Saturday night, right? I know you were out with Billy and his lady friend and, um, Gloria, but I thought…Well, whatever. Look, it’s around one fifteen, and I’m tucked in here for the night, all snuggly in that Red Sox T-shirt you gave me, and I’m going to read for a while and I’ll probably fall asleep after like two pages, but I wouldn’t mind if you called and woke me up, you know? I mean, if you don’t mind me being all sleepy-voiced and fuzzy. I don’t care what time it is. Call me, ’kay?” She yawned loudly. “Sorry, hon. Well, I hope everything’s all right. Good night for now.”

  I smiled. I was picturing Alex in her extra-large Red Sox T-shirt, which, of course, was her intention. I knew for a fact that she wore nothing else to bed. When she stood up, the T-shirt molded her body and fell to midthigh. In bed it would ride up over her hips. She liked to lie on her side, facing away from me, and then push her butt back up against me, and she’d grab my hand and hold it against her breast…

  Well, her message was having exactly the effect she intended.

  Henry was whining at the back door. I hung up the phone and let him in. When I gave him a Milk-Bone, it reminded me that Sharon’s call had taken me away from the restaurant before I’d eaten anything except a couple of olives and a hunk of Italian bread and half a glass of Chianti. I realized that I was starved.

  I found a slab of leftover pork loin in my refrigerator. I sliced it, slapped Dijon mustard on four slices of bread, and made two sandwiches of pork slices, with potato chips and dill pickles on the side.

  I wolfed down the sandwiches with a bottle of beer at the kitchen table, with my television tuned to ESPN so I could watch some baseball highlights from the previous day. Henry sprawled under the table so that he’d be in position to snag stray crumbs, not to mention any pieces of pork sandwich I might hold down for him. Henry liked potato chips, too, but he wasn’t fond of dill pickles.

  After we ate, Henry and I went upstairs. I brushed my teeth and went to bed. He curled up on the rug beside me. It was after four in the morning, but I was wide-awake, with a stomach full of pork sandwich and dill pickle and a head full of questions.

  I took the phone from my bedside table, rested it on my chest, and called Alex.

  She picked up the phone on the fifth ring. There was a long silence before her distant, muffled voice said, “H’lo?…Brady? Honey? That you?”

  “It’s me, babe,” I said. “Look. Why don’t you just hang up and go back to sleep. We can talk tomorrow. I just wanted to tuck you in, say good night.”

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m already tucked in. All alone here in my warm cozy bed. Why are you there and me here, huh? Wanna come snuggle with me?”

  “I’d love to. But not tonight, I don’t think. Let’s make it next weekend. Your place or mine, it doesn’t matter. How’s that?”

  “Mm,” she said. “I can’t wait.” She sighed. “I’m pretty sleepy. You okay? Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “I got called away on a new case. That’s where I was when you called. I’ll tell you all about it. Now here’s a hug and a kiss. Go to sleep.”

  She made a kissy sound. “You, too, baby. ’Night, swee’ie. Talk tomorrow.”

  I think she was asleep before the phone disconnected.

  Not me. I lay there wide-awake for a long time, with images of Ken Nichols’s pale, lifeless body and questions about Sharon tumbling around in my head. Even a couple of chapters of Moby-Dick, my never-fail soporific, failed to make my eyelids droop, and I didn’t drift off to sleep until sometime after the purple outside my window had faded to silver and the fresh breeze of a new April day had swept the clouds out of the sky.

  Seven

  Henry woke me up, whining to go outside. I asked him nicely if he couldn’t hold it for a while, but he made it clear that an accident was imminent if I didn’t get up and let him out.

  It was about quarter past nine on this Sunday morning. I figured I’d had less than four hours of sleep.

  I pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, followed Henry downstairs, and let him out into our walled-in patio garden. I put together a pot of coffee in my electric coffeemaker, and pretty soon the aroma filled the kitchen. I poured myself a mugful, took it out back, and sat in one of my wooden Adirondack chairs. Henry wandered over and lay down on the brick patio beside me.

  It was a warm late-April morning in Boston. The sun bathed my little backyard in its warmth, and the spring bulbs were blooming—tulips and daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths—and the irises and other perennials were poking through the earth.

  Evie had always been in charge of the flower beds. She’d planted them when we first moved here, and she was the one who’d tended them. This was the garden’s first spring without her. I liked flowers, but I had little knowledge and less enthusiasm for taking care of flower gardens. I figured they’d make it through this one season all right if I remembered to keep them weeded and watered. After that, they’d need serious attention. With perennials, you had to dig up, thin out, cut back, fertilize, separate, replant, reorganize. You couldn’t ignore perennials. They kept coming back at you, year after year.

  Evie had liked gardening, and I’d liked the fact that she liked it, because it meant that I didn’t have to do it. I used to enjoy coming home from court, after a day of explaining reality to angry clients and arguing points of law to skeptical judges, and finding her on her knees in
our garden digging and troweling and grubbing around in the earth. I’d bring out beers for both of us and urge her to take a break, and we’d sit at the picnic table, Evie in her cutoff shorts and baggy T-shirt and gardening gloves, smudges of dirt on her face, her auburn hair tucked up under one of my old Red Sox caps, and me in my pinstripe suit with my necktie pulled loose.

  Sometimes she’d slither onto my lap and nuzzle my throat and unbutton my shirt and get my clothes dirty, which I didn’t mind at all. That’s why God invented dry cleaning.

  Well, Evie was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. Once in a while something—like seeing the spring bulbs that she’d planted two autumns ago now rioting in our flower gardens—would remind me of her, and I’d remember something specific, like how she’d stick that excellent butt of hers up in the air when she kneeled in the garden to pull weeds, or how the skin at the nape of her neck tasted when she was sweaty after gardening on a warm afternoon in July…and then, for a few minutes, I missed her.

  But mostly I didn’t think about her. She’d been gone for a long time. Almost a year.

  Sometimes for no apparent reason Henry would suddenly scramble to his feet and trot over to the front door and press his nose against it, and nobody would be there. He’d stand there for a while, staring at the door, whining softly, and it would seem to me that he was missing Evie and hoping—maybe expecting—that she was about to open the door and come back home.

  After a while, he’d kind of sigh, and then he’d wander into some other part of the house and curl up and go to sleep.

  When my mug was empty, Henry and I went inside. I fetched the Sunday Globe from the front stoop and took it to the kitchen. I dumped some dog food into Henry’s bowl and put it down on the floor for him. Then I filled a bowl of my own with Cheerios. I sliced a banana on top, added half a handful of blueberries, sprinkled on some brown sugar, and ate it that way, crunchy, without milk.

  While I ate I skimmed the news sections of the paper. Ken Nichols’s murder had apparently happened too late on Saturday night to make the Sunday papers. I was curious to see how the press would handle it, how Roger Horowitz would be quoted, how Sharon’s role would be described, if Ken’s gym bag full of ketamine would be mentioned.