Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  I asked to speak to Mike, the owner, and he said that’s who I was talking to.

  “It’s Brady Coyne,” I said. “We talked earlier today about Gus Shaw?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Mike said. “The lawyer. You wanted to know if Mr. Shaw bought a pint of Early Times a week ago Friday, right?”

  “That’s right. You said there were a couple of other people working there that day.”

  “I didn’t forget,” he said. “I was gonna call you. Joey came in a little while ago. He’s got no memory of Gus Shaw. I described him, and he said no, he thought he’d remember him. Danny’s off today, but I called him for you like I said I would. Danny said he’s been in the camera store a few times, said he knew who Gus Shaw was. He didn’t sell the man a bottle, either. Said he’d never seen him in our store.”

  “And nobody remembers who they did sell those two pints to that day?”

  “Sorry, man,” said Mike. “Somebody puts a couple bottles on the counter in front of you, you check him out just to make sure you don’t need to card him, then you ring it up, and it’s on to the next customer. We try to be friendly and helpful. People sometimes want to talk to you about wine. Otherwise, except for the regulars or folks you know from around town, we don’t pay much attention.”

  I thanked Mike, snapped my phone shut, put it in my shirt pocket, tilted my head back, and shut my eyes. I hadn’t slept much the previous night. The daybed in my office was narrow, and Alex’s body was warm and curvy and unfamiliar. We’d ended up like spoons, which, after several years of sleeping only with Evie, and then several months of sleeping with nobody, was distracting and interesting enough to keep me awake much of the night.

  I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, Alex was kissing my ear. I reached up, hooked my arm around her neck, and steered her mouth to mine.

  “Um,” she said after a minute. “Nice.” She pulled away and sat in the chair beside me. “Sorry I didn’t stop when you came home. I had a whole plot thread I needed to get down before it went away.”

  “You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I definitely don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “My muse is a fickle girl, and I’m afraid she’ll abandon me if I don’t respect her whims.” She picked up my beer bottle and took a sip. “So what did you learn today?”

  I shook my head. “In a word, nothing. I haven’t come up with one shred of evidence to suggest that Gus did not kill himself. I’m sorry.”

  Alex shrugged. “You just haven’t found it yet, that’s all. You will.”

  “You’re the only one who believes that.”

  “What about you?” she said.

  “I have no belief,” I said.

  She looked at me for a minute. “So who did you talk to?”

  I shook my head. “Our deal was that I’d do it my way. I told you I didn’t want to be debriefed every day. I don’t want to be second-guessed. I don’t want to have to explain everything or account for my decisions or defend my moves. Right?”

  Alex was looking at me out of narrowed eyes. “If you think that this is just a big fat waste of your precious time …”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Don’t do me any favors, Brady Coyne. Forget it. I can hire some private eye.”

  “All I said was, I don’t feel like recapitulating every conversation I have. I talked to a lot of people today. Based on what I know now, I’d be inclined to conclude that Gus killed himself the way the police said, but I’m resisting conclusions. I’m not done yet. For example, I want to talk to Claudia, and I need you to set that up for tomorrow.”

  “Everybody thinks he committed suicide, don’t they?” Alex said.

  “It doesn’t matter what people think,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “they’re right. This is stupid. I’m just deluding myself. Who’d want to murder Gussie, anyway?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said.

  “Except I just can’t believe he’d do that,” she said. “I wish you’d known him … before.”

  I reached over and gripped Alex’s hand. “I wish I had, too.”

  She squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry. I’ll try not to nag you anymore.” She drained the beer bottle, then stood up. “We need more beer.”

  She was back a minute later with two cold bottles. She handed one to me, then clicked hers against it. “To getting some answers,” she said.

  “To truth,” I said. “Whatever it may be.”

  We both tilted our bottles up and drank.

  Alex sat in her chair beside me. “How would you feel if I rented an apartment in the South End?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  “Part of my novel takes place in Boston, in that neighborhood,” she said. “I could be near my nieces, too. It’s going to be hard for them. I saw a couple of nice places for rent today. I’m thinking of doing it.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  She hesitated. “I was asking how you’d feel about it.”

  “What about your house in Garrison?”

  “I can rent it. What I’m saying is—”

  “I know what you’re saying,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s just an idea.”

  For dinner, I grilled a matched pair of T-bones, along with foil-wrapped eggplant, green pepper, onion, and potato slices brushed with olive oil and oregano, and salt and fresh-ground pepper. Alex tossed a salad, and we ate out back on the picnic table.

  Henry sat between us with his ears cocked in his food-alert mode. His eyes followed every forkful from plate to mouth, and we rewarded his vigilance with an occasional hunk of fat or gristle.

  We were in the middle of a nice run of autumn weather. There was no way of knowing how long it would last. The sky was full of stars, and we wore sweaters against the cool autumn breeze. It was a perfect late-October evening.

  Our dirty dishes were in the sink and we were back outside sipping brandy-laced coffee when I said, “Look. About that apartment …”

  Alex shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Don’t worry about it.”

  “All I was going to say,” I said, “was that you should not make any decision one way or the other based on me. I mean, I don’t want to be a variable.”

  “Of course you don’t. You never did.” She chuckled in the semidarkness of my backyard. “You don’t think I learned that a long time ago?” She pushed herself to her feet. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to call Claudia.”

  She went inside, and came back out about ten minutes later. “Tomorrow afternoon around two,” she said. “I’ll take the kids for an hour. You and she can have one of your confidential conferences.”

  “Claudia’s okay with this?”

  Alex nodded. “She says she has some things she’d like to run by you.”

  “Really?” I said. “Like what?”

  “She didn’t confide in me,” said Alex. “Maybe she needs a lawyer.”

  We lapsed into silence, and after a while, Alex said, “I’m ready for bed.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Without discussing our sleeping arrangements, we both ended up in my den, I in my boxers and Alex in one of my extra-large T-shirts. It came halfway down her thighs, and if the contours of her body hadn’t been clearly outlined under it, it could have been considered modest.

  We stood there awkwardly for a minute. Then Alex crawled into the daybed, eased over to the far side, pulled the sheet up to her chin, and patted the empty half.

  I slid in beside her, then reached behind me to turn off the light.

  Alex rolled onto her side so that she was facing away from me. I put a hand on her bare hip. Her T-shirt had ridden up to her waist. She picked up my hand and pulled it around so that I was hugging her against me. She kept hold of my hand with both of hers, pressing it against her belly. My face was in her hair.

  “I just want to go to sleep this way,” she murmu
red.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  “I don’t want to …”

  “I understand.” I kissed the back of her neck. “Sleep tight, then.”

  “Umm, baby,” was all she said before her breathing slowed and deepened.

  Claudia Shaw was a tall, angular blonde in her midthirties. Except for the bags under her eyes and the lines around her mouth, you wouldn’t be surprised to see her on the cover of Cosmopolitan. She had that kind of face.

  She lived in a modest split-level ranch circa 1960 on a cul-de-sac off of the long country road that connected Concord and Bedford. After giving me solemn little curtseys, Juno and Clea, Claudia and Gus’s daughters, went with Alex, presumably to look for migratory birds at the Great Meadows wildlife preserve, which was a little way down the street.

  Claudia had some cookies in the oven she needed to keep an eye on, so we ended up at her kitchen table sipping from cans of Coke. “Alex is driving me crazy,” she said after an awkward minute or two. “She refuses to believe that Gus killed himself.”

  “You believe he did?” I said.

  She gave me a quick, humorless smile. “I believe he’s dead, and there’s nothing we’re going to do about it, and we’ve all just got to move on. Alex, of course, won’t listen to me. She wants to keep picking at it. I was kind of hoping I might convince you to talk to her about it.”

  “We do talk about it,” I said. “I think the only way to get closure is to find out the truth.”

  “The police are quite definite about the truth,” she said. “That should be enough closure for anybody.”

  I shrugged. “Alex sees it differently.”

  “What about you, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Brady,” I said. “Please.”

  “Okay, Brady. So how do you see it?”

  “Alex is my old, dear friend,” I said. “She asked for my help, so I’m trying to help her. That’s all.”

  “You didn’t know Gus, though, did you?”

  “I met with him a couple of times right before he died. I was representing him …”

  “Yes,” she said. “Our divorce.” Claudia put her forearms on the table and leaned toward me. “So you didn’t know him at all. That man you met wasn’t Gus Shaw. Gus Shaw would never kill himself. Alex is right about that. But that … that one-handed impostor who came back from Iraq, that shell of a man who Alex mistook for her beloved brother, that man was capable of anything. That man could kill his wife and daughters, and he could surely kill himself. Look. From the moment I met Augustine Shaw I worried about him. I worried about him all the time. It was just a fact of our life, our marriage. I knew that going in. He was always taking off for places where dangerous things were happening, and I understood that he had a compulsion to put himself as close to the action as he could get. He was in Bosnia and Afghanistan, New York and New Orleans. Africa, Asia, Central America. You name it. Terrorism, famine, tsunami, hurricane, civil war? Gus Shaw had to be there with his camera. He fed off risk and adrenaline. I always believed that was the allure. Not getting photos. Putting himself in harm’s way. That’s what drove Gus Shaw.” She shook her head. “He did get some amazing images, but I was a perpetual basket case.”

  A timer dinged, and Claudia got up, went over to the oven, and took out a sheet of cookies.

  “They smell great,” I said.

  “Toll House,” she said. “My girls’ favorite.” She slid another cookie sheet into the oven, then came back and sat across from me. “When they’ve cooled a little, you can have one.” She took a sip of Coke. “Anyway, I want you to know that I got used to the idea of Gus being dead years ago. It was how I got by. Imagining it, imagining my life after him, figuring out that I could be all right. It wasn’t a matter of if. Only when and where. When he went to Iraq, I assumed that was it for sure. When he came home, he was a stranger. It was like he had already been killed. He didn’t talk to me, he ignored the girls, he stopped working. Sometimes I’d wake up at night and find him downstairs sitting in the dark, just sitting there doing nothing. Sometimes he’d walk out of the house and be gone for hours.” Claudia reached across the table and touched my arm. “There was no love left in him, Brady. No love for us, no love for himself, no love for life. He frightened the girls. He depressed the hell out of me.” She shook her head. Tears glistened in her eyes. “I always loved him,” she said. “But I was petrified that we’d wake up some morning and find that Daddy had killed himself on the living room sofa. I didn’t want Juno or Clea to have to experience that. That’s why I asked him to leave. So he’d go kill himself somewhere else.”

  “The incident with the gun,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, indeed. The incident with the gun. That was the last straw. A gun in my house? Waving it around in front of his own little girls?” Claudia shook her head. “All those stories you hear about the crazy man who just lost his job at the post office so he murders his family, then turns his gun on himself? They flashed before my eyes, believe me.”

  “It must have been terrifying,” I said stupidly.

  She smiled quickly. “As it turned out, I guess I did the right thing. But it’s not easy, asking your husband to leave his house and never come back. And believe me, after he left, I still didn’t sleep very well. He knew where we lived. I assumed he had a spare house key. I didn’t know what he was going to do anymore. I didn’t know him anymore.”

  “You got a restraining order.”

  “Cold comfort,” she said. “So he could be punished for violating it after he came and murdered us all?”

  “Gus was in some kind of support group,” I said. “It didn’t help, huh?”

  “How much good did it do if he ended up killing himself?” Claudia brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe it did help. Maybe he’d’ve been worse without his group.”

  “Did he talk about it?”

  “Not really. Gus didn’t talk about anything. One of the men from his group called me the other day, a few days after Gus died, it was, and asked if there was anything he could do. That was nice. I told him no. I didn’t see how he could help.”

  “Have you ever met this man?”

  Claudia shook her head. “His name is Trapelo. Philip Trapelo. I had the impression he’s the leader, or whatever you’d call him.” She shrugged. “I’m not even sure of that.”

  I wondered if Trapelo was the one who’d set up Gus’s job with Jemma Jones and contacted Herb Croyden about the apartment. Jemma and Herb had both refused to give me the man’s name.

  “Did Trapelo give you his phone number?” I said to Claudia. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “I’m not sure he’ll do that,” she said, “but, yes, he gave me his number. Let me get it for you.”

  She went over to the refrigerator, which was peppered with photos and notes and greeting cards under magnets, and came back with a scrap of paper. She put it on the table in front of me. It had Philip Trapelo’s name and a phone number—a 978 area code and a number that looked like a cell phone exchange.

  I copied it onto the back of one of my business cards, then handed the paper scrap to Claudia. She magneted it back onto the refrigerator, then resumed her seat across from me. She put her elbows on the table and her chin on her fists and looked at me. I noticed that her eyes were the color of the sky at dawn. Pewter, with just a hint of the fading purple. Remarkable.

  “Something’s been bothering me,” she said after a moment.

  “Can I help?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know who to talk to about it. A lawyer, I think.” She smiled quickly. “Well, I have a lawyer. Had a lawyer. I guess I don’t need a divorce lawyer anymore. Lily’s been great. A real tiger. But as far as I know, all she does is divorce.” She arched her eyebrows. “Alex said you …”

  “I do whatever my clients need to have done,” I said. “If I can’t do it myself, I find them a good lawyer who can.”

  “So could I be your client?”

  “If Gu
s was still alive you couldn’t,” I said. “But now, sure.”

  “Maybe I don’t need a lawyer,” she said, “but I do need some advice.”

  “If it’s confidentiality you’re worried about,” I said, “you got it.”

  She nodded. “Confidentiality, secrecy, I don’t know. Here’s the thing. When Gus was over there in Iraq, every month or six weeks he’d e-mail me a file of photos. He was very adamant that he didn’t want me to look at them. He asked me to burn them onto CDs, and to lock the CDs in his file cabinet in his office, and then to delete them from my computer, and to never ever tell anybody about them.”

  “When Gus was on his other assignments,” I said, “is that what he did?”

  Claudia shook her head. “He’d e-mail photos home to me routinely, and I made CDs for him, but that was just for backup. I’m pretty sure that these were the only copies of the images he was sending me, this material he was getting in Iraq. For some reason, he was super secretive about it. Paranoid, really. I had the feeling that he’d gotten some explosive images.”

  “So what happened to the CDs?” I said.

  “He never mentioned them after he came home,” she said. “When he lost his hand, it seemed like he’d lost all interest in photography. He’d lost his interest in everything, really. To tell the truth, after Gus came home I didn’t give much thought to any CDs with his images on them. I had other things to think about. But a few days after he—after he killed himself—I get a call from a woman named Anna Langley. She was Gus’s agent.”

  “Like a literary agent?”

  Claudia nodded. “Or a business manager or something. She made deals for him. She basically helped him to sell his images.”

  “So what did she want?”

  “In a word, she wanted his photos. I told her I didn’t have them. She got very upset. Said she had a number of things in the works that would bring us some good money—serious money, she called it—and would be a great legacy to Gus and his work. She reminded me that she and Gus had a legal agreement, and she practically accused me of … I don’t know. Holding out on her. Violating their contract or something.”