Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  “Mr. Shaw’s fingerprints,” he said. “Nobody else’s. It doesn’t say anything about his computer files in this report, which I take to mean they didn’t find anything relevant except for that e-mail at the top of his Sent list.” He lined up the sheets of paper he’d been looking at, tapped their ends on the table, put them back in their manila folder, and closed it.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Those are the forensics of it,” he said. “It’s quite a lot, I’d say. Everything points to Mr. Shaw killing himself. Nothing points to anything else.”

  “What about his frame of mind?”

  “Everybody they talked to said about the same thing. The man suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He got his hand blown off, for God’s sake. He probably saw more horror over there than he could comprehend. He was violent and depressed and unpredictable.”

  “Can I ask who they talked to?”

  “Now you’re pushing it, Coyne. I’m telling you all this as a courtesy, out of friendship, not so you can second-guess the medical examiner and the cops who investigated. I just figured that Alex has a right to know before it’s in the newspapers or something.”

  “You want me to share this with Alex?” I said.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, “if you’d rather.”

  “No,” I said. “I will. That’s considerate of you.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Mr. Considerate. That’s me.”

  “She’s not going to like this verdict,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Suicide’s a bitch, all right. The poor guy couldn’t take it anymore. Simple as that. It’s always tough for the loved ones. They never want to hear it.” He stuffed the folder into the manila envelope, tucked it under his arm, and pushed his chair back from the table. “Just be grateful he didn’t decide to take out his wife and kids along with himself.”

  “Jesus, Roger.”

  “Happens all the time,” he said.

  “The fact that Gus didn’t do that …”

  “Don’t mean shit.” He stood up. “Well, thanks for the coffee.”

  “What about his apartment?” I said. “Can we get back in there?”

  He shrugged. “The police tape is gone,” he said. “It was a quick and straightforward investigation, Coyne. Gus Shaw killed himself, and everybody’s going to have to get used to the idea.”

  I nodded. “I guess I misjudged the man.”

  “You?” Horowitz smirked. “Wouldn’t be the first time, huh?”

  “No, you’re right. I’m not very good at judging people.”

  “I mean,” he said, “just look at your personal life.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s a mess.”

  TWELVE

  Alex showed up around six thirty on Friday lugging two big paper bags. She banished me to my den while she worked in my kitchen. She said she got nervous when anybody watched her cooking.

  She served a baked casserole of Martha’s Vineyard scallops and portabello mushrooms in a creamy port wine sauce, with risotto, acorn squash, a salad of field greens, and a baguette of still-warm-from-the-bakery French bread, all washed down with a bottle of pinot. It was a chilly mid-October evening, so we ate at the kitchen table, with Henry on the alert under our feet for stray crumbs and a Sarah Vaughan CD playing in the background.

  I hadn’t told Alex that I’d talked to Roger Horowitz and that the verdict was in on Gus. I figured after a nice relaxing dinner and a few glasses of wine, I could ease into it. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to like what I had to tell her.

  I didn’t mention Gus at all, in fact, and neither did Alex. A week had passed since we found him dead in his apartment in Concord, but it still felt like a raw, oozing wound, and now Gus was the big bellowing pink elephant stomping around the house that we were pretending didn’t exist, the obvious subject we were avoiding.

  When the food was gone and the wine bottle was empty, we loaded the dishwasher and took mugs of coffee into the living room. I put an Oscar Peterson CD on the player. Alex pried off her sneakers with her toes and nestled herself into the corner of the sofa with her legs tucked under her. She was wearing snug-fitting black jeans with a long-sleeved pale blue jersey top and dangly turquoise earrings. A subtle touch of makeup around her eyes picked up the color in the earrings and the shirt.

  I sat beside her. She watched me with the hint of a smile around her eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “You were staring at me.”

  I shrugged. “I guess I was. You look good.”

  She rolled her eyes. “For an over-the-hill broad who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week, you mean.”

  “No,” I said. “No qualification. You’ve still got it.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say, anyway.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “Not sleeping so hot, huh?”

  “I fall asleep okay,” she said. “I’m usually exhausted by bedtime. But then I wake up a few hours later with this awful empty feeling, and my brain starts whirling around with thoughts and memories, and I can’t go back to sleep.”

  “It’ll get better,” I said.

  “Maybe.” She shrugged.

  “So where’d you learn to do that?” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “The food. It was great. Excellent. If I’d known you were a gourmet cook, I’d never have let you go.”

  “Oh, ha-ha,” she said. “You let me go. That’s so not funny.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  She held her mug up to her mouth and peered at me over the rim. Her eyes were large. “So were you planning on not mentioning Gussie at all tonight?” she said.

  “Talking about Gus will always be a hard and stressful thing for both of us,” I said.

  “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

  “I thought we’d wait till after we ate,” I said.

  “Now’s the time, then.”

  I nodded. “I talked to Roger Horowitz yesterday,” I said. “The ME has issued his verdict.” I gave a small shake of my head.

  “They’re saying he killed himself, huh?”

  “Yes. Everything points to it.”

  “Well,” she said, “they’re wrong.”

  “Look, honey—”

  “Don’t give me that ‘honey’ bullshit, Brady Coyne. Just tell me. Are you going to support me on this or not?”

  “I’m going to support you,” I said. “Yes.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “I didn’t say humor me.”

  “No,” I said. “I meant support you.”

  “And prove that they’re wrong about Gus, right?”

  “About all I can do is talk to people,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  “We can do that, you mean,” she said.

  I shook my head. “No. If I’m going to do it, it’s going to be just me, my way, by myself.”

  “What about me?” said Alex. “What’m I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to trust me,” I said. “Because I’m better at this sort of thing than you are, and I’ve done way more of it than you have, and I’m more objective than you, and if you were involved, you’d surely get in my way and be a pain in the ass and screw it up.”

  She glowered at me for a moment. Then she shook her head. Then she smiled. “You’ve given this some thought, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Ever since I talked to Horowitz.”

  “Does that mean that you agree with me? That Gus didn’t kill himself?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My mind is open. I’m skeptical. Logically, it makes sense. Gus had many reasons to—to do this. The evidence all points to it. On the other hand, knowing him, having talked with him, I do find it hard to believe.”

  “The evidence is wrong,” said Alex. “You’ve got to prove that.”

  “I don’t intend to prove anything,” I said. “I just want to find the truth of it, if I can.”

  “I honestly didn’
t expect you to agree to do this,” she said.

  “I’m fairly big on truth,” I said.

  “I thought I’d have to argue and wheedle.”

  I patted my stomach. “You seduced me with good food. After that meal, how could I say no?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Plus,” I said, “I hate the idea, however unlikely, that somebody might have killed Gus, that there might be a murderer out there who’s clever enough to fool the medical examiner and the police and get away with it.” I smiled at her. “Plus, you’re very cute and I don’t want to let you down.”

  “Cute,” she said.

  “Wrong word? Is cute some sexist insult?”

  “No,” she said. “I love cute. I haven’t been cute since I was a chubby eight-year-old.” She reached over, gripped my arm, and pulled me toward her. She looked into my eyes for a moment. Then she reached up and cradled my face in both of her hands and kissed me on the mouth. “You’re kinda cute yourself, you know,” she said.

  She kissed me again, and I kissed her back, and our tongues touched, and then Alex murmured in her throat and put her arms around my neck and kissed me hard and deep and pressed herself against me.

  After a minute she put her hand on my chest and pushed herself away from me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. I hadn’t kissed a woman since Evie, over four months ago. My pulse was pounding in my head. “I’m not.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m all emotional about Gus, and you’re being awfully nice to me, and I guess it’s just, you and I, we’ve always fit together, and you feel comfortable and familiar and safe. It’s like we’re still what we used to be. I wasn’t thinking about Evie or … or the past seven years, or anything.”

  “Evie and I are over with,” I said.

  She tapped her chest. “In here?”

  I shrugged. “I’m still getting used to it.”

  “So the last thing you need is me barging into your life right now.”

  I touched her face. “The first thing I need is you,” I said. “I just don’t know where it’s going to end up.”

  “Nobody ever knows that,” she said.

  I ended up lying on the sofa with my feet in Alex’s lap. She massaged my toes and soles and calves and told me about the past seven years of her life. It had been a writer’s life, full of solitude and stress and self-discipline, interrupted by an ill-conceived and disastrously executed marriage to a wealthy older man, a pleasant, well-meaning real estate tycoon from Portland whom Alex had never really loved and, as far as she could tell, had never truly loved her. She said they might’ve just stayed married anyway if he’d let her continue to live in her little house on the dirt road in Garrison and work on her books, but, of course, that would’ve been no kind of marriage.

  I talked about Evie and how when you don’t get married, it’s easy to split up, but you don’t have the finality of divorce. Our relationship had just seemed to peter out, with her on the West Coast preoccupied with taking care of her father and me still in Boston learning how to live alone all over again.

  Alex didn’t ask any hard questions about the future, and since I had no wisdom about the future, I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t know whether Evie and I were over with forever or just temporarily. How could anybody know something like that?

  Around midnight we let Henry out for his bedtime rituals. It was a clear brittle autumn night. Alex and I stood on the deck. The sky was peppered with stars. She put her arm around my waist and laid her cheek against my shoulder.

  I waved my hand at the sky. “Show me Snoopy again,” I said.

  She pointed, and I leaned over and sighted along her arm.

  “See?” she said. She made a small circular motion with her finger. “His left ear, that’s those three stars in a kind of pyramid shape, and there, see? His right one?”

  I squinted and I did see that left ear, but I was quite certain that without Alex’s help, I’d never be able to locate Snoopy or Elvis or the Green Ripper in the night sky.

  We went back in and I gave Henry his bedtime Milk-Bone.

  Alex leaned against the sink and looked at me.

  “You’ll sleep here tonight?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “With me.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll use the bed in my office, okay?”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “It’s fairly comfortable,” I said, “but it’s kind of narrow.”

  She smiled. “I don’t see why that should be a problem, do you?”

  I walked into Minuteman Camera in Concord center a little after ten the next morning. A sixtyish man with a ponytail and a gray beard was sitting on a stool behind the counter peering at a computer monitor. It was just one large rectangular room. Along one wall was a glass case with shelves lined with cameras and lenses. There were picture frames and telescopes and tripods. The walls were hung with photographs, mostly portraits and Concord scenes. There were no customers in the store on this Saturday morning.

  When I went over to the counter, the man looked up and said, “Something I can help you with, sir?” He wore a plastic name tag that said PHIL.

  “I’m looking for Jemma,” I said.

  He jerked his head in the direction of a door on the back wall. “She’s in her office. Want me to tell her you’re here?”

  “Yes, thank you.” I gave him one of my business cards. “Tell her I’m Gus Shaw’s lawyer.”

  Phil looked at the card, then at me. “Damn terrible thing.”

  I nodded. “Awful.”

  “I hope there’s no problem for Jemma,” he said.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  He went to the door, knocked softly, opened it halfway, leaned in, and said something. Then he pulled the door shut and came back to his place behind the counter. “She’ll be right with you, Mr. Coyne.” He hitched himself onto his stool and resumed looking at his computer.

  A minute later the door opened and a woman came out. She looked about thirty. She had black hair cut very short, and dark Asian eyes, and skin the color of maple syrup. She wore khaki pants and a man’s blue Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows.

  She had my business card in her hand. She glanced at it, then looked at me and held out her hand. “Mr. Coyne? I’m Jemma Jones. Are you going to sue me?”

  I shook her hand and smiled. “Why would I do that?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what lawyers do.”

  “I just wanted to talk to you about Gus Shaw.”

  She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Let’s go have coffee.” She turned to Phil. “I’ll be at the Sleepy. If you need me, I’ve got my cell with me.”

  It was a five-minute walk from the camera shop on Main Street to the Sleepy Hollow Café on Walden Street. Neither of us spoke until we got there. Then Jemma said, “The patio or a booth inside?”

  “The patio,” I said. “I met Gus here the other day. We ate on the patio. They have good muffins.”

  She smiled. “They named this place for a cemetery. Did you know that?”

  “The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery,” I said. “Where Thoreau and Emerson and the other literary folks are buried.”

  “Tourists always assume it’s from the Washington Irving story,” she said.

  “We locals know better.”

  None of the outside tables was occupied. We chose one near where Gus and I had sat a week and a half earlier. A waitress appeared instantly. I asked for one of their date-and-nut muffins and black coffee. Jemma Jones ordered a cinnamon-apple muffin and a pot of tea.

  When the waitress left, Jemma said, “So you were Gus’s lawyer, huh?”

  “I still am his lawyer.”

  “Even though he’s dead?”

  I waved my hand vaguely. “There are legal matters.”

  “Because he committed suicide?”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  She turned her head and looked
away, and when she looked back at me, I saw that her dark eyes brimmed with tears. “It’s my fault, you know.”

  “What’s your fault?”

  “That he … he killed himself.”

  “He killed himself because of you?”

  She nodded. “That day—Friday, it was, a week ago—he dropped a camera. I don’t know what happened exactly. He only had one hand, and I guess he was trying to handle it with his—his missing hand—and it fell on the floor. Cracked the housing and shattered the lens. Basically ruined it. Before I could stop myself, I yelled at him.” She looked up at me. “See, the thing was, I had stopped thinking about him as a man with only one hand. Mostly, you didn’t notice, and he had a way of keeping it hidden. His missing hand, I mean. Anyway, I yelled, said something like, ‘If you can’t be more careful, you can’t work with cameras.’” She shook her head. “I’m saying this to one of the best photojournalists in the business. So he looks at me, and I can see the hurt in his eyes, and he says, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ Then he just turned around and walked out of the store. And that was the last time I ever saw him.”

  “You think that’s why he killed himself?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Gus had a lot of baggage, all right. But I guess that’s probably what pushed him over the edge.”

  “About what time was that?”

  “What? When I yelled at him?”

  I nodded.

  “Around noontime, I guess. Maybe a little later than that.”

  “So you weren’t surprised to hear that he’d committed suicide?”

  Jemma leaned back in her chair and looked up at the sky. “I was shocked. But not surprised. If that makes any sense.”

  “You think he was suicidal, then?”

  “When I knew him?” She shook her head. “He didn’t seem suicidal. Oh, I knew about what was going on. Losing his hand. The PTSD. His wife filing for divorce. All the things that add up when you look back on it. He was depressed and paranoid and … he was a disaster, Mr. Coyne. But he always seemed to me to be a pretty tough guy, too. A fighter, you know?” She waved the back of her hand in the air. “I guess I was wrong about that. A little thing like getting yelled at, and he …”

  “How well did you know him?” I said.

  At that moment, our waitress came with our order, and Jemma Jones and I paused to butter our muffins.