Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  “Nope.” She shoved her pad into her apron pocket and stuck her pencil behind her ear. “You hear about Sunshine?”

  I nodded.

  “Skeeter’s pretty shook up,” she said.

  “So am I,” I said.

  Mary-Kate shrugged, as if she wasn’t particularly shook up and didn’t really understand it, and wandered away.

  She came back a minute later with my bottle of Hibernator and a chilled mug.

  I was halfway through the ale when Ethan came in. I didn’t recognize him at first. Not only was his hair no longer purple, but the ponytail was gone and so was the eyebrow stud. He looked more like a young attorney or stockbroker than a college kid majoring in the performing arts.

  I waved at him.

  He looked my way, waved and smiled, came over, and slid in across from me.

  We shook hands across the table.

  “You’re looking good,” I said.

  He smiled and touched his head. “The hair, you mean?”

  “Nope. The purple was fine by me. Just, in general. You look healthy and happy. Are you?”

  “Yes. Both of those things. I’m doing fine. How ’bout you? How’s Evie?”

  “Evie’s in Scottsdale conferring with hospital administrators and sitting around the pool in her bikini. She tells me she’s excellent, and why shouldn’t she be, soaking up the Arizona sunshine by the pool?”

  “You miss her,” said Ethan.

  “Sure I do. She’ll be home Sunday.” I waved the subject of absentee girlfriends away with the back of my hand. “Listen. Thanks for coming. I need to talk to you about something. You get a burger and a beer out of it.”

  “No need for that,” he said. “You saved my life, remember?”

  I shrugged. I remembered, all right. It was hard to forget. It happened a couple of years earlier. Ethan had disappeared, and when I finally tracked him down, I found him doused with gasoline, semi-conscious, and imprisoned in a steel storage shed that was about to explode. I managed to get him out with seconds to spare. We both survived by a whisker.

  On the basis of that, he kept insisting that I’d saved his life.

  The thing that Ethan kept ignoring was the fact that if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been locked in that shed in the first place.

  I waved at Mary-Kate, and she came over. Ethan asked for the Ceasar salad, garlic bread, and a Coke. I kept forgetting he was a vegetarian and still too young to drink alcohol legally.

  Mary-Kate called him Honey.

  When she left, Ethan turned to me. “So what’s up, Brady? What did you want to talk about?”

  I took out the picture of the dead girl and put it on the table in front of him. “Do you know her?”

  He frowned. “This a morgue photo?”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “She looks young.” He squinted at the photo, then looked up at me. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her before.”

  I shrugged. “I just thought—”

  “I’m gay, remember?”

  “Sure.” I smiled. “I didn’t necessarily think you had a relationship with her. Just that you might know her. You do know girls, right?”

  He smiled. “Some of my best friends are girls. So what’s the story? Who is she?”

  “She showed up at the house the other night. I don’t know why. I never saw her before. But she had a scrap of paper with my address on it. It occurred to me that maybe it was you she was looking for. You or your father. Maybe she knew you from when you were living there.”

  I told Ethan about finding the girl’s body in the backyard.

  I didn’t tell him about what had happened to Sunshine.

  Ethan was shaking his head. When I finished telling him about it, he said, “That’s a terrible story. I wish I could help. I mean, if she was looking for me, thinking I still lived there on Mt. Vernon Street, it would’ve been over two years ago that I knew her. How old is she? I should say, how old was she when she died?”

  “Fifteen or sixteen, I’d guess.”

  “So if I knew her from when I lived there,” Ethan said, “she would’ve been thirteen or fourteen at the most.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I knew any girls that age then.”

  “My other thought,” I said, “was Walter.”

  “I suppose she could’ve been looking for my father,” he said, “though I can’t imagine why. But even if she was…”

  Walter was dead. He couldn’t help. That’s what Ethan was thinking.

  “She had your address written down, you said?” said Ethan.

  I nodded.

  “If she knew where you lived—or where my dad and I lived—she wouldn’t need to write it down, right?”

  “Good point,” I said. “But maybe she knew one of us from someplace else, had never been to the house, so had to look up the address.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry, man. That’s a huge bummer. Wish I could help you. You still gonna pay for my supper?”

  “I can’t talk you into some good red meat?”

  “Couldn’t get it past my lips.”

  “I don’t know how you do it,” I said. “No steak? No burgers? No lamb chops?”

  “You develop a taste for tofu,” he said.

  Ethan and I had finished eating. He was telling me how he’d switched majors from drama to communications, and we were sipping coffee and talking about Internet advertising when Skeeter came over to our booth. He wasn’t smiling, which was unusual for Skeeter.

  He gripped the edge of our booth with both hands, put his face close to mine, fixed me with his spit-colored eyes, and said, “You heard about Sunshine, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I blame you,” he said.

  “I do, too.”

  “I mean,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “you come in here, you tell her you’re going to help her, and then you give her this picture, ask her to show it around, and I can tell you, Mr. Coyne, she was hell-bent on doing it. She felt like she owed you something. For helping her. The rest of the night, she kept taking that picture out of her pocket and looking at it and mumbling about it.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “After she left that night, I never saw her again. She ends up in an alley behind a Dumpster with her throat ripped open. So you tell me.”

  “I agree with you,” I said. “I think what happened to Sunshine had something to do with that girl in the photo. I think if I hadn’t involved her, given her that photo, asked her to show it around…if I hadn’t come in here that night, Sunshine wouldn’t have gotten killed. I feel awful about it. I blame myself.”

  Skeeter was staring at me. “You saying you agree with me?”

  “Yes. It’s pretty obvious. She died because of me.”

  He touched Ethan’s shoulder. “Shove in, kid.”

  Ethan slid over in the booth, and Skeeter folded himself onto the bench beside him, put his forearms on the table, and leaned toward me. “Listen, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “I’m pretty upset about this, you know? I mean, I really liked Sunshine. She was making a lot of progress, getting her shit back together. She was a good kid. She had plenty of problems, but she had a lot going for her, too. Best thing that ever happened to her, you taking on her case. That could’ve turned her whole life around, you know? So it pisses me off. Her getting murdered, I mean. But I guess it probably ain’t fair, blaming you for what happened. You didn’t kill her. You were trying to help her.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s fair.”

  Skeeter waved his hand in the air. “It ain’t your fault, Mr. Coyne. I was outa line. Anyways, I was the one who brought her out to talk to you. As much my fault as yours.”

  “Blaming ourselves doesn’t do any good,” I said.

  “That good-looking police officer,” he said, “whats-her-name, Mendoza, the detective, she came by this morning, talked to me about Sunshine. She seems pretty sharp.”

  “Detective Mendoza is extremely sharp,” I said.

/>   “So what about you, Mr. Coyne? I figured…”

  “I feel sad and guilty about Sunshine,” I said, “but Detective Mendoza is working on her case. It’s the girl who died in my backyard that I’m trying to focus on. Nobody’s working on her case. The police will do their best to find whoever killed Sunshine, but I don’t think anybody’s trying very hard to figure out what happened to the girl. I want to know who she was and why she came into my backyard to die.”

  “They gotta be connected,” said Skeeter. “Sunshine and the girl.”

  “So it seems,” I said. “Sunshine, showing the girl’s picture around and then getting murdered. Seems like more than a coincidence to me.”

  “Whoever killed Sunshine did it because of the girl? Is that what you think?”

  “I do,” I said. “But what the hell do I know?”

  Ten

  I woke up all of a sudden. Henry was curled against my hip, and flickering colored lights were dancing on the bedroom ceiling. I hitched myself into a semisitting position and looked down at the television set at the foot of the bed. A red-and-blue racing car was skidding across the track. It caromed off the wall and went spinning back toward the infield, spewing smoke and gravel. Other cars swerved and skidded around it. One of them smashed into another car’s rear end, flipped, and went tumbling end-over-end down the track.

  It all happened in eerie silence. Somewhere along the way I’d muted the TV.

  Then the phone rang, and my mind registered the memory that it had also rung a moment earlier.

  I groped for the phone beside the bed, pressed it against my ear, and mumbled, “H’lo?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Evie. “I woke you up.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yes I did. Why lie about it? Nothing to be ashamed of, being asleep at…what is it there? A little after midnight? Oh, hell. No. It’s like one-thirty in the morning, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. I was watching car racing on ESPN.”

  “You were sleeping,” she said. “You never watch car racing.”

  “It’s SportsCenter. All kinds of news. There was this awesome accident.”

  “Sports scores are not news,” she said.

  “You usually call earlier.”

  “I always call, though, don’t I?”

  “I meant to stay awake for your call,” I said.

  “Long day?”

  “Friday, you know?”

  “I just got back to my room,” said Evie. “It’s not even midnight here.”

  “Out drinking,” I said.

  “Sure. With some underwriters from Salt Lake City. Mormons.”

  “Men,” I said.

  “There’s no such thing as a female Mormon underwriter,” she said. “We talked about insurance. They drank Diet Dr Pepper. Not me. I had Margaritas. Yum-yum.”

  “You’re a little drunk,” I said.

  “A little. Makes me horny. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “I’ll be home day after tomorrow. No, wait. Tomorrow, where you are. I’ll be home tomorrow. It’s Saturday already in Massachusetts, right?”

  “You’re pretty blasted, huh?”

  “Kinda. See, it’s still Friday in Arizona. So I’ll see you, like I said. Day after tomorrow.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sunday afternoon. Four-fifty. American West number eight-twenty. Nonstop, Phoenix to Boston. Expensive.”

  “The hospital’s paying,” she said.

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “That would be dumb,” she said. “I’ll get a cab. Just be there when I get home, please. You and Henry.”

  “Dumb?”

  “Sweet,” she said. “But dumb.”

  After I hung up with Evie, I lay there for quite a while watching the muted television. I pictured Evie, sitting in some bar surrounded by men in white shirts and black suits and dark blue neckties, Evie laughing and drinking Margaritas, the men short-haired and smooth-faced, not smiling, sipping Diet Dr Pepper, watching her out of hooded eyes.

  She’d been gone for nearly a week. I’d almost gotten used to living alone again.

  Henry was pressing hard against my hip. He grumbled and twitched when he slept. I reached down and scratched his forehead. I didn’t think I could get used to living without a dog.

  I spent Saturday morning tidying up our house. We have a cleaning lady who comes in every other week. Her name is Sammie. She takes the T over from Dorchester on alternate Tuesdays. She has her own key. Usually Evie and I are at work when she comes. We leave her a check for eighty dollars, made out to cash, on the kitchen counter. When we get home, the check is gone. That’s how we know she’s been there.

  Sammie vacuums the rugs and washes the floors and cleans the toilets, and she seems to do a decent job of it, although neither Evie nor I is the sort of person who notices a little dust or grime—or its absence. When Sammie unplugs something so she can plug in her vacuum cleaner, she never remembers to plug it back in when she’s done. So when we go to turn on a light or toast a bagel, it doesn’t work. That’s another way we know for sure that Sammie’s been there.

  We told her when we hired her that we didn’t want her moving anything, organizing anything, putting anything away, or throwing anything out. Evie, for example, hoards catalogs. I save old fly-fishing magazines. Any sensible cleaning lady would throw away last year’s Crate and Barrel catalog or some 1998 issue of American Angler. We didn’t trust Sammie’s judgment. We were worried that she’d be sensible.

  On the day Sammie’s due to appear, Evie suddenly becomes a whirlwind of housecleaning energy. Gotta get the place tidied up. Can’t have the cleaning lady go back to Dorchester and tell her friends that the white folks in the Beacon Hill townhouse are messy and sloppy and tolerant of filth, even though, basically, we are.

  That, I keep telling Evie, is why we need a cleaning lady.

  I wasn’t cleaning up for Sammie on this Saturday. It was for Evie. She’d be home tomorrow, and I’d been living like a bachelor. So I collected six days of newspapers from the coffee table and the bathroom and the floor beside the bed and piled them in their special box in the storage room behind the kitchen. I loaded the dishwasher with coffee mugs and frying pans and cereal bowls. I changed the sheets on the bed and the towels in the bathroom. I ran a load of laundry.

  While I was getting the house ready for Evie’s return, my mind kept swirling with thoughts about the dead girl in my backyard, bled out and frozen, and Sunshine, dead behind a Dumpster in Chinatown, her throat ripped out by a broken bottle. I was wishing that somebody would call me and tell me they’d figured it all out.

  I thought about the street girl, Misty, which I doubted was her real name, seeing my dead girl throwing up on the sidewalk the same night she came into in my backyard. That reminded me of the panel truck with the New Hampshire plates. Misty said the guy behind the wheel was looking for a young blonde. Most likely he was just another predator, hung up on young blond girls.

  But it was possible that he was looking specifically for my dead girl. Maybe he knew her. Maybe he was her father. Or maybe he was her high-school chemistry teacher, or her minister, or her soccer coach, or her uncle. Maybe he was the man who got her pregnant. Maybe she’d been running away from him.

  I closed my eyes and conjured up the logo on the side of the guy’s truck. In my memory it looked like two cartoon bears, with a couple of pine trees spiking up in the background. It could have been intended to represent some other animals, but to me, they looked like a mother—or father—and a baby bear.

  I sketched my mental image of the bears on a piece of scrap paper. There had been writing under the logo. It was in a fancy script, and I hadn’t been able to read it, and squeezing my eyes shut and seeing the truck in my mind didn’t make it any clearer.

  I tried to see the license plate. No numbers appeared in my mental picture. Just the green-and-white New Hampshire plate.


  I went on the Internet and Googled “New Hampshire business logo.” That produced the web addresses for half a dozen logo designers and an endless list of sites with “New Hampshire” or “logo” in their names or text.

  I tried “New Hampshire trademark” and got a long list of Granite State trademark attorneys, several sites at the Secretary of State’s office, consulting firms on incorporation, information about intellectual property…

  I typed in everything I could think of that might convince Google to show me what I’d seen on the side of that panel truck, with no hits. After an hour, I gave up.

  I ate a ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich on pumpernickel, with a dill pickle and a handful of potato chips, standing at the sink to catch the crumbs and save a clean dish. I gave Henry a corner of my sandwich and a couple of chips. He turned up his nose at the pickle.

  Then I leashed him up and we strolled down to the Common, where I let him off his leash. He hooked up with a yellow Lab and a springer spaniel, and the three of them raced around in the snow chasing squirrels and pigeons and each other while I stood on the plowed path with the elderly couple who owned the Lab and the springer. Their names were Gladys and Irv. Late seventies, I guessed. Spry and happy and in love with each other. They lived in a townhouse on Beacon Street, convenient to restaurants and theaters and the T and the Common. They especially loved theater.

  They’d lived in Massachusetts all their lives, they told me, but they were starting to get a little sick of New England winters. They said they were thinking of selling the townhouse and moving down to Asheville, North Carolina. Their daughter lived in Asheville. They weren’t ready for Florida. They still enjoyed the change of seasons. The Carolina hills seemed like a good compromise, although they weren’t sure if there was any decent theater in Asheville.

  I glanced at my watch. It was almost three-thirty. I called in Henry, leashed him up, said good-bye to Gladys and Irv and their two dogs, and with Henry at heel, I headed for the Shamrock homeless shelter.

  I rang the bell, and a minute later Patricia McAfee opened the door. Today she was wearing denim overalls and a green plaid flannel shirt and red sneakers. Her gray-blond hair was pinned up on top of her head.